Skol'ko Let, Skol'ko Zim
by HalfPaintedRose
Summary: When Russia proposes a massive push forward in nuclear power, the Planeteers have to make a prolonged visit to try to change people's minds. Fortunately Gaia has found someone she believes has the drive to help them stop it. Unfortunately he's Linka's ex, and the media and eco-villains alike are going to drag all the ghosts of her past out to try to break her down. W/L, past L/OC.
1. Chapter 1

**AN:** I am incredibly nervous about posting this as my first fic on here. Primarily because my fandom friends aren't just all on AO3 and not this site, but they're all posting fanfic for literature and high-brow movies while I have in the works fanfic for not just cartoons, but kids' shows at that. So I admit, there is a high chance I will continue to be overly nervous even though from what I can see, this is a perfectly civil fandom.

I also know nothing makes readers turn away and run faster than the singular couplet of words 'love triangle'. But I am a slave to my plot bunnies, so with this idea's continual inability to leave me, I give you this fanfic in all its' overly tropperiffic glory.

* * *

It was often said in Russia that God liked trinities. The phrase was roughly equivalent to the phrase 'good things come in threes' in English. Anatoly Yurasov was hardly a religious young man, so his knowledge of such phrases came from his defiant great-grandfather, who refused to abandon the old faith for political safety.

That said, if God liked trinities, then there was a dark side to it his _praded_ hadn't informed him of. This was indeed his third time meeting with Linka in a surprising context, but he would hardly call this a good moment insofar as such things went. That their mutual first impulse was to embrace as Russians rarely did in public told him he was not even remotely over her; that he shut his eyes and buried his nose in her hair for a moment told him there was no possible way they were going to get through this without the past resurfacing, and then when he opened his eyes and caught sight of the gob-smacked look on one of the other Planeteers' face, Anatoly knew that this was going to be one of those days where only God knew how things would end and perhaps even He wondered.

"Lenoshka," he said, good cheer prevailing even as he felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. " _Zvyozdochka_ , you should have told me you were coming to Moscow. I could have arranged something a bit nicer than a meeting in the office – perhaps I could take you and your fellow Planeteers out for lunch? My grandfather would likely sign off on it as a business expense now that you're an international superheroine."

She laughed, punching him in the arm. "No more _'zvyozdochka_ ' from you, then! I am not so little anymore. But I'm afraid we've come for business, not for food, Tolyan."

Things clicked in his head then, and he sighed, his face losing its' good humor as hers did. The nuclear power initiative proposed in the last week had made headlines and was of course going to be poorly received by the Planeteers. They had fought against nuclear waste and similar things in the past. This time, though, it was all going through official government channels instead of being handled or hampered by madmen who had grown into fully fledged supervillains. So for once they would get to talk something out which, while likely a welcome change of pace from fighting, was also going to be significantly more sensitive to handle. At least Linka was Soviet born, meaning the whole situation wasn't doomed from the word go. Unfortunately, one of the Planeteers was American born, meaning the situation was going to be at best a difficult win... and even more unfortunately, that was the same Planeteer who had yet to quit glaring at Anatoly like he'd stolen something his-

 _Wait._

Anatoly did a mental comparison between himself and the American. Redheads, pale, taller than Linka, slightly older than her, well dressed for their own definitions of that term, hint of a dimple, and likely someone who voiced his opinions clearly given that scowl. It hit Anatoly like a punch to the gut that she had essentially found an American version of him and within a month of their breaking up, no less. Unsure how to feel about that, he did what he'd been taught by his mostly-male family a good Russian man did: he buried the stab of pain and betrayal inside and got down to business for the sake of not appearing weak in public. The sooner they settled this and got Linka out of here, the sooner he could go back to pretending he'd moved on with his life.

He straightened up and looked directly into those perfectly blue eyes, the ones that had nearly made him throw his career away once. "Just because I represent Novosibirsk's economical needs and requests to Tovarisch Yeltsin doesn't mean I'm any more capable of stopping this on my own than you are."

"So you _are_ against the plan to jump start the economy through nuclear energy," the sleek Asian girl on the other side of Linka said. Anatoly gave her a cold look. Apparently they weren't as politically savvy as he'd hoped.

"I have yet to give my position on any such issue; the declared plan is too new and still under analysis," he responded with almost second-nature levels of cool dismissal. The darker-haired redhead turned to his childhood friend and launched back into Russian, mixing his idioms to boot in a way that would make his great-grandfather proud. " _Volka nogi kormyat. V nogakh pravdy net._ "

Linka nodded, her hair framing her face differently than when he'd last seen her – it had grown a few inches, he noted. "Come on, let's go get lunch. As they say in America, it will be on Anatoly." Away from the prying ears of the office, they might actually be able to get something done.

Assuming Anatoly didn't die of jealousy at the sight of Linka looping an arm through Wheeler's.

* * *

Ma-Ti rubbed at his temples, feeling the beginnings of an incredible headache.

The second Anatoly had set eyes on Linka, his entire body language had shifted, but deeper within him, in his mind, his mood had shifted as well. There was a flood of conflicting and dueling emotions running through him, all overruled by love and happiness. They'd been in Russia for an hour navigating proper channels to get to any official. Ma-Ti had not seen a single hug or kiss since they'd arrived, yet the young Representative of Novosibirsk could not open his arms fast enough for Linka. She had radiated uncertainty, hope, affection and happiness all in equal measures. Wheeler had been broadcasting enough jealousy, confusion and insecurity to power an entire city on its' own. He had hoped that over the last six months Wheeler had gotten over those things, had gotten used to the idea Linka was dating him and only him. Jealousy made Ma-Ti physically ill if he had to be exposed to it for too long. It was also, honestly, completely incomprehensible to him that Linka would automatically prefer an old friend to her boyfriend.

Admittedly Linka and Anatoly were not making it better by discussing the building changes to Moscow since they were young. So far they had commented on three stores, a park, the repaired and restored old fashioned fixtures on the street lamps, the neon signs and graffiti, and a high-class bakery that apparently they'd both gotten sick from once.

"They redid the icerink? Ah, if only my brother was here," Linka sighed, nostalgically.

"What, so he could get kicked out again? I'm amazed he doesn't have a scar from that night."

The blonde looked out the window wistfully. "Remember when Boris used to drag us to that theater?"

Immediately, the mood of everyone in the limo plummeted. Wheeler put an arm around her, letting Linka sink back a bit. Anatoly bit his lip for a moment before nodding. " _Da_. I haven't been able to watch _Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears_ since..." the auburn haired man trailed off, shutting his eyes. He still had a VHS copy of the film, Boris' favorite, unplayed back at his apartment. "I should have had him stay with my family. He had friends in Novosibirsk, he would have been safer there. Happier." His guilt was obvious even to those without the power of Heart. "He could have taken up any number of classes at the private schools there. I could have helped him plot out a future and now we're stuck with remnants of the past. I'm sorry, Linka."

Wheeler finally chimed in. As much as the two set each other on edge there was, it seemed, a common ground in guilt. "Hey man, I'm the New Yorker. I grew up seeing that stuff and I didn't think 'hey, maybe I oughta tell Linka what her cousin's gotta be dealing with'. It didn't even occur to me until way, way after we got there."

Anatoly offered him a grim, mirthless smile. "Americans didn't invent drugs, Wheeler. Nor did you invent loneliness. If you think that our cities don't have those same problems, then the media has done its' job perhaps a touch too well."

"You are both being ridiculous," Linka noted, quietly shaking her head. "Wheeler, we have been over this. I mentioned Boris to you all of three times; you don't have the ability to see the future. Tolyan, you promised me you would stop torturing yourself over what ifs. Now, unless Boris is relevant to our political purpose here – you have _got_ to kidding me," her voice rose in volume and anger when Anatoly winced. "They aren't going to politicize that to shoot down the entire Planeteers as a whole."

"That's hardly all they're going to politicize," he shot back, clearly incredulous. Only Ma-Ti caught the undercurrent of worry. "All your skeletons will be dragged out of the closet, and you could not have conceivably picked a worst person to be the advocate for your team's environmental stance. Did you really not think about the obvious ways this undermines your cause? Not only are the purposed nuclear power plants in _my_ oblast, which means everything I say is biased by default, but reporters aren't going to have to dig deep to find how far back and deep the two of us go. Or how far we nearly went."

Ma-Ti could _feel_ the migraine turning into a headache as Wheeler asked with utter and mounting horror, "What's that supposed to mean?!"

The older redhead pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling. "Linka and I were engaged."


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note:** Holy crap, the support was fast and surprisingly large for what I thought would be a long-dead fandom. Thank you to everyone! I'm glad that no one's bailed on the concept so far. I could gush about how happy it makes me to be writing this and how I welcome feedback but that would sound like review baiting and take up too much space, so instead I have a brief but important note.

This chapter is pure set up for the next three. It is entirely lacking in action and eco-villains and I apologize for that. This is necessary to lay out some foundation for everything else to build on, and I accept it's not the most interesting chapter to read. The next is going to be a lot more intense, though, so try to accept this is that lull in the first act before it all hits the fan.

Thank you all again for your continued support and patience.

* * *

Linka looked at her fellow Planeteers. Kwame and Gi had mutual looks of shock, Ma-Ti was massaging his temples as if his life depended on it, and then she looked at her current boyfriend with the kind of dread that could only come from her past returning to bite her.

She was going to get used to that sensation by the end of this trip.

Wheeler was justifiably betrayed. After all, they'd been together for just over half a year, she'd met his family, he'd met what was left of hers, and their dates ranged from the normal fare to saving the world side by side. They'd been to every continent together, including Antarctica. Their six month anniversary had included both fighting Dr. Blight and a lovely dinner at a pizzeria in Wheeler's old neighborhood. That was the kind of life they lived, turbulent, chaotic, entwined and oddly satisfying. His face was a picture of denial, hurt and that old jealousy he could never shake getting its' second coming as he looked between Linka and Anatoly, probably putting together Linka's lecture on proper forms of Russian address and how very friendly the diminutives the Russians had used for each other were.

"I suppose," Kwame ventured, breaking the incredibly awkward silence, "It is better we learn and discuss these things amongst ourselves than learn them from the papers."

"You never told me," her beloved American managed, shellshocked. "You never – you were – wait, how old were you? Both of you?"

"Sixteen," the blonde replied nervously, not able to look at Wheeler's face and see what she assumed would be a negative reaction.

Anatoly squared his shoulders and sat up a bit straighter, as if it was his job to protect Linka from incoming accusations. "Eighteen. Which was legally in the clear under USSR laws, for the record; it wasn't some American-style shotgun wedding where our hands were forced by scandal to march down the altar. I had a ring, I had a proposal speech that quoted Tolstoy, I got down on one knee in front of a frankly uncomfortable number of people on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre and asked. _Don't_ look at her like that, like it was something it wasn't. If you'd like to think lowly of someone, I'm more than a good enough candidate for the job."

The other redhead stared at him, taking in the poker face that had made Anatoly Yurasov the youngest Administrative Governor in Russian history. He tried not to think about what Linka's wedding ring might have looked like or the fact that he probably couldn't afford tickets to the Bolshoi, let alone both those things in one go. But those things were distractions from the real question: "What happened to make you call it off then?"

"That's not my place to say – it's Linka's. She was the one who called it off, she gets to go into details if and when she chooses," he responded smoothly, with a half-shrug. Only someone like Linka who'd known him for multiple years could see the tiny tells of his nervousness. As much as she'd hoped they could part as friends, this was already wearing him down. "It's not relevant to the situation at hand anyway. The press wouldn't care if she told them all the details of the reality of the past, they'd make up lies to tantalize the public anyway. This is Moscow, there's the truth, the commonly accepted truth, and personal truths. People mix and match them to their liking."

Linka buried her face in her palm. "I'm beginning to remember why I left Moscow."

There had been a lot for her in this city. There had been the entirety of the Yurasov clan, Boris' mother's family in the eastern part of town, the embassy, the private school where Linka had first met Anatoly, Mosfilm Studios where Boris had hauled Mikhail, Linka, Anatoly and Boris' own girlfriend Ovdotya to multiple times just to watch the filmmaking process with starry eyes, Saint Basil's Cathedral where Anatoly's great-grandfather, a man who had lived long enough to simply stop caring about what was and wasn't politically in favor, had told Linka all kinds of stories about miracles and angels people had supposedly seen there. Ovdotya had been an aspiring architect and the place was a vision in her eyes; she and Boris had first held hands inside it while Anatoly shared a knowing look with Linka. Once upon a time this city held the future itself for Linka. This was where her cousin fumbled his way into love, where her friends and boyfriend went to private schools in their chosen fields, where her uncle made a living, where she could have gone to college and studied environmental science. This city was where hopes and dreams came to life but, much like Wheeler's cherished New York, it was also where those things died.

The Moscow she knew was as much a nightmare as it was a paradise. Everyone was entirely selfish, the wealth gap was horrifying, there were more ethnic tensions and gangs here than she wanted to even think about, police brutality was about as common as corruption, the Russian mob had their hands in more than the government would ever admit even after the fall of the USSR, all the while the best and brightest lived out their lives in closed cities, having gotten rich off of the city they'd made into a swirling sea of competition, backstabbing and vicious poverty. This place was as cold as the part of Siberia Anatoly hailed from and just as full of vultures. They would turn on their own in a heartbeat. Linka would have her past pulled out and dissected for every little detail that could be used against her as politicians in favor of what she opposed offered under the table incentives to the press to stop the Planeteers.

"Everyone hates Moscow," Anatoly broke her out of her thoughts. "None so much as the natives, but it's where I have to work and where this proposal will either go through and reshape Russia or be usurped by a better proposal for the country. I've got more than a few good leads that have made it clear the only way out is going to be with a grander idea. The people are sick of the rising unemployment levels."

She leaned her head against Wheeler's shoulder. "Novosibirsk opposes the initiative, though."

Anatoly nodded. "We're one of few oblasts that aren't experiencing an economic downturn and our record environmentally speaking is one of the cleanest on record. Which I hope is why you've decided to inflict this on your Imperialist darling and myself, and not just some newly-emerged desire to see me suffer."

"Gaia sent us," Gi said, and then it was Anatoly's turn to facepalm vigorously.

* * *

The restaurant was the kind of overly decadent place that, were this _Doctor Zhivago_ , another one of Boris' favorite movies, would be where the pompous bloated unlikable characters threw their party in the first act to establish just how rich they were compared to the common man.

Kwame was instantly uncomfortable, moreso when Gi took him by the arm to deflect the stares their multi-racial group was getting and several women cooed out things he could tell were comments about them as a couple even though he didn't speak Russian. Sometimes he hated that he was as good as he was at deciphering people's tones of voice, particularly when it came to situations like these. In any case, he was more worried about Ma-Ti than anything else. Everyone else was shocked by Linka having once been engaged, but only Ma-Ti got to feel the reactions in his head acutely afterwards. Maybe he'd been able to detect some of the preceding emotional tension, too. He squeezed the youngest Planeteer's shoulder gently, giving him a small smile. Ma-Ti was doing his best, which was more than appreciated under the circumstances.

All things considered the three of them were in better shape to take the news than Wheeler if only because sixteen wasn't an unreasonable age for marriage in their respective cultures. Sure, Gi's mixed background as a Zainchi Korean meant she was coming at it from a more pragmatic point of view – being married at that age indicated a baby was on the way or two people were ignoring common sense depending on who in her family she asked, but it wasn't as awful as it could have been. Kwame had seen couples married at that age who went on to lead happy enough lives. His own father hadn't married until exceptionally late in life, but that was a stark rarity born out of how deeply invested in his work the man had been. He hadn't wanted marriage or children if he couldn't support them, so he'd given up on the idea until one day his best field worker pointed out he already had more than most people within the countryside had. She'd told him he was a coward in the face of happiness that needed to learn to think with his heart and a year later, they were married. Marriage was a strange and ever-mutating concept for any Planeteer given how many cultures they were exposed to. Ma-Ti's people had less official ceremonies and more just people living together as a sign of marriage, which they did when they were self-sufficient enough to build a home together and feed themselves without outside help. Theoretically younger people than Linka and Anatoly could get married, though it wasn't common.

The real shock was in how she had apparently been hoping not to mention this to any of them if she could have helped it. Linka wasn't the most forthcoming with her family life or her personal one, but it did seem like something that should have come up before now. At the very least she could have told them on the way over so everyone wouldn't have had to go into this functionally blind. Whether she meant to or not, Linka was giving Kwame a vibe she had something to hide.

Whatever it was she was trying to keep under wraps, however, Anatoly was adhering to her rules. If Linka wanted to share what had happened, more power to her, but he would not be the one to tell them anything. He was in many ways Wheeler's opposite; well dressed, well spoken, cautious instead of impulsive, and tight-lipped instead of expressive. Although both redheads were shooting each other the kind of looks only the truly lost could give one another, the fact that Anatoly could swing them a private table at an upscale restaurant on the spur of the moment wasn't lost on Wheeler. Kwame knew the feeling of being in the presence of someone who not only had more than you but much more and had grown up with that as their normal. This time, though, the intimidation factor was at least unintentional.

"This place is under constant political and media blackout," the Novosibirsk man informed them when they were all seated. "The owner has friends in high and low places. Whatever's said here stays here, or else bad things tend to happen to whoever blabbed. Though at this hour it's more of the old money crowd anyway."

His face was sharper than Wheeler's, more angular, with eyes darker than Kwame or Gi's, perfectly black to the point they reflected images more easily than most were comfortable with. His hair was darker, straighter, forced into submission so it could look professional. And yet Kwame could see in his tiredness that there was a mask in place, that the suit and fine dining were a way of keeping the very vulnerable, very real young man who just wanted to help his people from showing. In another life this could have been Linka, fighting the system from within, playing these games of political speed chess, eyes calculating, world rooted in unsteady ground. That he actively objected to the far-fetched nature of this while not once saying he wouldn't help showed a glimpse of what Linka likely used to see in him. Anatoly Yurasov would do the right thing even if it was hard.

In the meantime, he mostly had been building up the powerbase to actually put things into action. Neutral zones to talk, a pristine record, no scandals for the papers to eat up, and somehow he'd earned Gaia's recommendation. That seemed to have stemmed from Novosibirsk's outstanding environmental record, something that he'd worked to make even better. They generated power for much of the country and did it through clean, efficient means, because he'd talked up a storm about keeping up with other countries and getting rid of the older means of producing power. They were an industrial center that recycled their scrap metal in order to get as much use out of everything as possible. Everything he put forward came under the banner of efficiency and providing wealth for their people and their country, but it always had an environmental point or payoff to it. He used one to hide the other – which Gaia saw through because she saw people as they were, not as they wished to be seen. All the wordplay in the word didn't stop him from being the kind of person she'd normally dub an honorary Planeteer.

He'd also gotten his job with no small amount of help from nepotism and Linka had to have left him for a _reason_. People didn't get engaged and then separate without cause. If it was as simple as growing apart then they would've said so. As Linka and Anatoly helped their non-Russian guests with the purely Russian menus, Kwame noticed something not just a little startling.

Anatoly was still wearing his engagement ring.

* * *

"I'm doomed," Wheeler moaned, his words muffled by the pillow of the hotel bed. As usual, the male three-fifths of the Planeteers shared one room, the girls the other. Even with Linka and Wheeler together, there were some things that would just draw too much scandal from the papers.

Ma-Ti patted him on the back. Despite his age, he'd turned into a rather sage person regarding the massive pile of insecurities that sometimes surfaced in his friend. "Wheeler, they are just friends. Focus on the positive. We got a lot done today, and will get more done when we are introduced to more officials this evening."

The redhead stared at the ceiling lights, continuing on as if uninterrupted. "He has a limo. He has a _driver_. He wears suits that probably cost more than my Pops paid for rent in a month back home! And-"

"And Linka chose you over him," Ma-Ti pointed out gently. "All the limos in the world are not going to change that she was calling you her 'sweet Imperialist dog' the day we met."

Wheeler ran a hand through his hair. "I – I know, you're right. Thanks, little buddy. It's just weird being around a guy who's got all that history with her. Why didn't she mention him before?"

Pausing, Ma-Ti reflected on Linka's mixed emotions when she first saw him. There was happiness there, but an overwhelming, almost misplaced sense of regret. "I think it was hard for them to separate after so many years of being friends. Perhaps she wanted a fresh start – you would not want Linka to have judged you by your old neighborhood and friends either."

"Yeah." He chewed his lip, thinking. "I still told her about all of it, though. Eventually, I mean."

The younger boy shrugged, getting up to go through his suitcase. They were going to met and metaphorically rub elbows with as many people of importance as Anatoly could force their paths to cross with tonight, but Ma-Ti was more interested, deep down, in getting to see Moscow's Bolshoi Theater. He had always enjoyed the amplification of positive energy that came from a group of people watching a performance; with the Heart Ring, it was a genuine delight. Unfortunately, it was the very place Anatoly had proposed to Linka, something that had made Linka genuinely uncomfortable, which was nothing compared to the emotional maelstrom of happiness-pain-love-nostalgia-loss that was Anatoly's apparent default state. Ma-Ti didn't know or want to know how someone could be that emotionally unstable and manage to look calm and collected and hold complex conversations without letting a hint of the reality glimpse through. Despite their jetlag, the Planeteers had to make allies and make them fast, so they wouldn't be getting any sleep until around midnight by Anatoly's estimate, one in the morning by Linka's.

He glanced up at Wheeler, who still looked thoughtful. "She doesn't do things at the same pace you do. I don't know as much about how people work as I wish I did, but the one thing I know is that she loves you. This doesn't change that."

There was no arguing with that, at least.


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** Okay, this chapter introduces every character I need introduced for this story to function, the villains finally show up, and things just got infinitely more politically complicated. That's the good news. The bad news is I couldn't contain my Kwame/Gi tendencies so some of that bled into here along with some of Gi's backstory. Sorry. Admittedly it's critical for later but I can't justify the shippy bits. Those are just there because I have poor impulse control. (Side note: Gi's Korean name was my own headcanon due to Gi on its' own being a male name. I'd put money on it being a family nickname, personally.)

It's my sincere hope the plot thickening (or curdling) will be enough to make up for that or that perhaps you'll even enjoy it. In any case I want to thank the continual reviews, encouragement and general lack of flames I've been getting. I really appreciate your support.

* * *

Dr. Blight, dressed head to toe in the best anti-radiation suit money could buy, made no attempt to hide her critical looks at the area. There was nothing here that didn't look pieced together from whatever was on hand, some of the barrels full of waste awaiting transport so acidic in their smell it cut right through the protective gear.

"You _live_ here," she said in disbelief after a length of silence. "Gotta hand it to you, even I thought that was a Russian urban legend. Verminous himself wouldn't set foot in here."

Her companion, unoffended by the blatant disgust, shrugged, replying mildly, "I wouldn't let him live here to begin with. He's too wasteful."

She snorted. "You're in the wrong business if you want to avoid pollution."

"I want to avoid _inefficiency_ ," he corrected lightly, tucking a strand of his black hair behind his ear idly. He wasn't wearing a stitch of protective gear, and that unnerved her more than anything else about this, really. That and the too-cheerful nature her business partner had. "A lack of productivity is unacceptable when everything is going well and we can steal resources. With the _current_ economic climate of Russia? It won't be long before they turn their gazes to the past for ideas on how to proceed with the future. The Planeteers will take my home from me in the name of cleaning it up. Verminous would have been killed here years ago in order to make way for people who could provide to the community as a whole. There are a lot of ways to outlive your usefulness, you know, and a lot of uses for body parts."

The wind was the kind of cold only Russia could provide. She shuddered at the way he didn't shudder, at the way his eyes caught the evening light and reflected it like a cat's, at how naturally he contemplated who he'd cull from humanity's herd if he had half the chance. Not for the first time since they'd made contact, she considered that she might have finally been in over her head a bit too deeply even for her. He was right, though; there was no way the Planeteers would let this city stay as it was, a testimony to everything the USSR hadn't done when it came to environmental safety. The state of slight disrepair was nothing compared to how it should have been, had been repaired with ruthless efficiency with whatever was on hand by people who understood survival was the mother of creativity. Small wonder that this place had gone under both the Soviet and Russian radar for so long. On the outside, it was a crumbling mess. One had to step inside a building proper to see that it was all being kept up and above code covertly, would have had to have been there at night to notice small lights where there shouldn't have been any power at all indicating the lingering human presence in what was officially a ghost town. Dr. Blight had learned long ago that what was officially going on and what was actually going on were different things.

She just hadn't quite realized that meant entire _cities_ were being lied about. And this wasn't the only one, either, which didn't exactly soothe her nerves. If ever her activities as a villain and a scientist put one of those places in danger, there wasn't anything she could do to stop very swift, brutal retaliation that she likely wouldn't even be able to track. Most of her equipment either didn't work here or ended up radioactive and in need of disposal afterwards. As untraceable as this partnership would be, as mutually beneficial, she was going to stay away from Russia for a good, long while after this. Her host turned to her, smiling in a way that might have been charming had it not been accompanied by his eyes flashing again in the light. Faint blood stains were still drying on his jacket, which he appeared not to notice or care about. His face was soft, untouched by age, and she backed up on instinct like cornered prey. Something was simply not right about this place. She wanted out, immediately.

"Just make sure you can deliver your end of the deal," she said icily. His smile only widened in amusement, as if it were silly for her to doubt him. "I've had enough of my business partners falling through on me."

"Don't worry, Gospozha Blight. We want them gone as much as you do." Patting her on the back through the hazmat suit, he turned to one of the doors that led into some hidden, well lit place. "Come, let me show you what I have planned for the evening…"

* * *

Linka was a vision of loveliness, hair having been down into an intricate fishtail braid that had been made into a perfect bun, the front of her hair having been put back with small clips that looked like real pearls – Wheeler didn't dare ask and break the spell – with matching earrings. Her dress had a high collar, sleeveless and form fitting to the waist until it flared out, falling just short of the ground with a slit that came up to just above her knee in the left side. The navy blue color made her eyes pop and her lip gloss was just the right shade. For a moment Wheeler forgot everyone in the crowd and saw only beauty.

And then Anatoly ran over Wheeler's good mood by taking Linka's hand, kissing it and saying sincerely, " _Zvezda moya, zoloste;_ you haven't aged a day."

"No amount of flattery makes up for putting me through a night of this," she told him with a sigh, but smiled regardless. "That's a nice start, though. Keep it up and I may still speak to you after tonight."

"I missed your honeyed words and genteel mercy," he snarked back, looping an arm through hers as if it were like old times. For a moment Wheeler just stared, the realization that they'd done this before hitting him. They used to joke, laugh, have these back and forths with each other, and had nicknames and in-jokes with each other. How many hours had they spent at places whose luxury he couldn't comprehend, groaning together at the bourgeoisie around them, smiling at each other?

Linka pulled his arm from Anatoly's, giving him a pained smile. " _Nyet_ , tonight I sit with my boyfriend. Besides, I need you on the other side of the aisle of our box to run interception. Who knows who might turn up tonight?"

Anatoly glanced at the crowd, then back to the Planeteers. His smile when he saw Kwame attempting to reach for Gi's hand and faltering was a bit too knowing; Kwame held his head higher and tried to pretend any excess color in his cheeks was due to the cold. Gi was surprisingly stunning in her dark purple halter back dress. It was simple, A-line, and fell to her knees. She had the lightest of purple eyeshadow applied and was still breaking Kwame's concentration completely. _At least I'm not the only one suffering tonight_ , Anatoly thought. (Yes, Wheeler was likely suffering, but Wheeler was Linka's boyfriend; he couldn't be naïve enough to think her ex still posed a threat, much as Anatoly himself wished he did.) Ma-Ti looked better than he had since Anatoly had first seen him, taken in by the mood of the crowd enough to apparently keep the emotional mix in front of him from affecting him too badly. Scanning the crowd, only a few of whom seemed to recognize the Planeteers, he made an educated guess in response to Linka's rhetorical question.

"Gospodin Aslanova, a couple of new-money men trying too hard, the head of Moscow's police department, that obnoxious pop singer with the world's most overdone hair I took you to see once, Chukotka's representative, the worst human being in all existence, and a half dozen professors." He shrugged at Linka's dismayed expression. "I doubt most of them will be in our box, but you asked. What was that Anna Akhmatova quote – 'pray before you go to sleep that you don't wake up famous'? We never should have laughed at that back when we were children."

"Boris and Ovdotya prayed _for_ fame," the blonde noted as the crowd thinned enough they could get into the lobby. "Is there any chance she might show up?"

The redheaded Russian shook his head. "She keeps to herself. Besides, she still hates you, me, and your friends for not stopping things with Boris from going off the rails." He held up a hand as she started to object. "Logic doesn't have a seat at this table, Linka. Wouldn't you look for someone to blame if Wheeler died?"

She clung to Wheeler tighter, looking away, out at the crowd. " _Nyet_. I would blame myself."

"That's my job, thanks; you haven't tortured yourself for a day over _anything_ ," he muttered darkly before the first of many people 'just happened' to notice the Planeteers and wander over. His expression melted into a pleasant, neutral almost-smile. "And it begins. Look sharp, _Amerikosy_ , they'll all be gunning for you whether it sounds like it or not."

Ignoring Linka's glare at his word choice for her boyfriend, Anatoly greeted what proved to be, indeed, the first round of many, many people.

* * *

Gi had her head against Kwame's shoulder and was, despite the last thirty minutes of rapid fire introductions, enjoying a rather pleasant not-quite-date with her best friend.

She'd always been fascinated by ballet, but Japan still had the Right To Refuse on its' lawbooks when she was a child, and so as a Zainichi Korean she had been turned away by every instructor her parents tried to find for her. She remembered very vividly buying all the accoutrements for ballet lessons, giddily talking with her friends Fuyuko and Reika at school about it. Her gaggle of male friends had wrinkled their noses in distaste at the idea. Only Gi's older brother Tae-sung had thought to warn her that some instructors wouldn't want to teach her. Their parents had shushed him, but when rejection after rejection compounded and she finally gave up when she was eight, it was her brother's arms she'd thrown herself into, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Ji-ae _,_ " he had murmured, scooping her up in his long arms. " _Mizu ni nagasu_."

The advice to let it go had hardly been the advice she wanted, but it was the advice she'd needed to hear. Japan had no place for people like them, and he'd known it from the second she came home holding a tutu. She'd thrown away almost all of her ballet things that night, punctuating her sobs with kicks to the wall or bed and loud declarations it wasn't fair. Some part of Gi hard been hardened by the experience, by the knowledge people were standing up against her for no reason other than her birth. The part of her that was angry and sometimes explosive was born then, as she sank to the ground holding unused ballet shoes and Tae-sung sat down beside her, unable to even honestly say it would be okay. Perhaps that had been the moment he'd given up on some of his own dreams, in retrospect, but at the time it had seemed less like the end of an era and more like the end of innocence as she knew it.

That didn't mean the love of ballet was gone from her, or that she hadn't dreamed of trying to see a performance like this. Though their jobs as Planeteers had kept them busy, she'd had a lifelong desire to see a ballet done somewhere that pulled no punches about the grandeur of the art form. This place delivered perfectly. Even Wheeler, for all his declarations that ballet was girly, was spellbound. The Bolshoi Theatre did not do subtlety, they went all out with nearly a hundred dancers on stage at any time, the music done by an orchestra and band that knew every note by heart, every costume bombastic, detailed, sparkling and every ballet performer effortlessly in perfect sync with each other. Between the swelling music and the enrapturing visuals, the only tension left in the room was that of Gi reliving broken dreams. Kwame actually put an arm around her, which was rare. She'd told him all about the bitter discrimination her family faced for refusing to take on Japanese names and forsake everything Korean about them, as part of an explanation why she wanted to keep the team out of Japan's affairs as much as possible. Her old neighborhood held a lot of dashed hopes, dead dreams and heartbreak for her. But that was why her eyes were positively riveted to the stage.

The lead ballerina was Korean.

Her name was Khorin Yon (Hyo-rin Yeon, rendered in non-Cyrillic on the programming) and she was from Volgograd. Gi had never been so riveted to one person in her entire life. It wasn't just that people had refused to give Gi lessons back then, it was that they always had an excuse to throw at her too. Arms too short, face not expressive enough, legs too thin, torso too long – they had beat the idea into her that she quite simply _couldn't_ do it even if they let her into classes, that her too-big feet and too-small eyes would destroy any kind of performance she put on. And yet, in defiance of all those words, those years of being denied access to all kinds of activities for those reasons, there on stage, dancing to a packed house under a massive spotlight, unashamed and flawless, stood a Koryo-saram woman with her every move having been ranked superior to that of her more traditionally Russian co-workers.

Gi wanted to cry. She wanted to cheer. She wanted most of all to find those dance instructors and make them sit down, gather them from Japan and let them gape at the twirling precision and flutter of exact movements that was on stage. Something like pride swelled in her for Khorin Yon, a sort of power that came from seeing the old system smashed down and progress made in the face of people who clearly didn't want it made. More impressive still, this ballet was Sergei Prokofiev's _Romeo and Juliet_ , one of the rarest ballets for a reason. It was incredibly difficult, hard on the knees and had segments done entirely on pointe without resting the legs. Not a drop of sweat was visible on Khorin's face as she danced around Romeo in coy circles, elegantly extending her hand to him in a gesture of hesitance and newfound shyness in the face of meeting her true love. Gi squeezed Kwame's hand, looking at him.

'She's Korean,' she mouthed to him, not daring to speak and disrupt the people around them.

He smiled and pulled her closer. 'Yes she is,' he mouthed back. 'And she won't be the last.'

She nestled against him and let happy tears slide down her cheeks.

* * *

The game plan had been for Anatoly to introduce them to a minimal number of new people during the intermission, but then Gi had asked him if there was any way of meeting one of the dancers, and he stared between her and Kwame and tried his hardest be a cold, unfeeling monster and refuse. That's what he knew his father would have done. His grandfather would have done it without a shred of diplomacy. Ever his _praded'_ s protégé, though, he'd buckled almost instantly when he glanced at Ma-Ti, who was communicating 'say yes' with every fiber of his being.

"Just this once," Anatoly told them, trying to salvage at least a touch of his usual aloofness and failing as Gi's face lit up like Moscow at night. "I can't abuse my power or your superhero status' too often." He led them out of their box, Gi ecstatic, Kwame thanking him, and the redhead couldn't help a small smile. "Guess you caught her name on the program. She's been headlining for two months, you know…"

As the three left, talking ballet, Wheeler turned to Linka. "I never realized ballet went that long. Is the intermission so they can take a breath? And was that a saxophone I heard?"

She laughed. " _Da_ , that was a saxophone. This is a very modern ballet for the Bolshoi. They breathe through the whole thing, though. How is it you lived in New York City and never saw a ballet?"

"I'm not really a high-culture guy, babe." More accurately, not only could he not have afforded it, his reputation would never have recovered.

"But you are enjoying yourself tonight," the blonde pointed out. "Perhaps you just need to give these things a chance."

"Maybe." He looked at the exit through which Gi, Kwame and Anatoly had left. "I didn't realize that this stuff meant so much to her."

Ma-Ti sighed lightly, looking at him. Sometimes, just due to be being white and American, Wheeler was accidentally oblivious to the impact racist had on other people. "It is not about ballet. It's about seeing someone like you do something people like you have been told you cannot do, Wheeler. Imagine how your Irish ancestors were treated in America and how much a Irish performer might have meant to them."

"Well said," a voice said behind them, and Linka locked up in a way Wheeler had only seen her do in the face of actual near-death situations. The three Planeteers turned as one. There was an incredibly well dressed, overly groomed dark haired man with a face made for wry smirks and eyes of such a vivid cerulean they seemed unreal. He was rail-thin, long limbed and wearing some kind of solid gold pin with four C's on it that Linka's eyes narrowed at. "Of course, Malinka knows all about ethnic discrimination – and how to duck it."

She was on her feet before he could take a step closer. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, still smirking. "How did you even get in here, Zlatan?"

Even though Linka rarely dropped forms of proper address in Russia, generally adhering to manners, all her reaction got out of Zlatan was an arched eyebrow. "Clearly you haven't been keeping up with any news about what's going on in Yugo, _Lenoshka_. But," he raised his hands in an almost amicable gesture, "I'm not here to talk politics. Can't a man want to check in on his ex-girlfriend? Or are you and Anatoly not as over as we'd all been led to believe?"

"At least Anatoly never hit me," she spat, jolting Wheeler in the worst possible way. A sense of heated panic and burning anger overcame him. "You are everything wrong with your people."

Zlatan started to retort, only to be cut off by Wheeler. "Hey," the American said sharply, putting himself between his girlfriend and the man with a not-quite-Russian accent, fists clenched, "How about you take a hint and leave before I make you?"

Linka's ex paused, vivid eyes sweeping over him, a grin a little like a shark bearing its' teeth crossing his face. "So you're the replacement. A little scruffier than I would have imagined, but any port in a storm, right Malinka?"

Linka opened her mouth to say something far too impolite to have an English equivalent.

That was when all the lights suddenly went out.

* * *

The world seemed to explode in white and orange electricity, bursts of it reaching for the sky, the sound of thunder amplified by the acoustics of the theater, silencing the crowd. Somewhere, someone got a spotlight going.

Center stage was a tall young man, smile bright, hair parted to the side, his clothing positively mundane in the midst of all the flashiness of the attendees. He didn't need anything to make him stand out when his eyes were bright orange, entirely inhuman, and he snapped his long fingers to start up music from an unknown source somewhere seemingly near the ceiling. Within seconds, a simple violin solo filled the room. The man began to sing, as if this had been rehearsed many times before, as if he were a performer.

" _Bayu-bayushki-bayu,  
ne lozhisya na krayu. Pridot seren'kiy volchok  
i ukhvatit za bochok. On ukhvatit za bochok  
i potashchit vo lesok, i potashchit vo lesok.  
Pod rakitovyy kustok. K nam, volchok, ne  
khodi, nashu __**Boris**_ _ne budi.  
Bayu-bayushki-bayu,  
ne lozhisya na krayu. Pridot seren'ki volchok  
i ukhvatit za bochok. On ukhvatit za bochok i potashchit vo lesok  
i utashchit vo lesok. Pod malinovyy kustok. A __**Malinka**_ _upadot  
Pryamo Katen'ke v rot."_

The silence was as unsettled and profound as any had ever been. This might have been due to the lights slowly coming back on, bathing the entire theatre in orange light, or due to the fact that the second security approached two other, equally orange-eyed men had appeared, hauling Gi out from behind the curtain with a gun to her head. Her ring was casually handed to the singer, who slipped it on without a second's pause, and as the lights flickered on and off in flawless sync with his singing, a general sense of unease filled the entire theatre. A smell that hurt to breathe, acidic, crisp and burning, filled the air.

He clapped his hands and beamed out at the audience, but his head turned in the direction of the Planeteer's private box for a long, tense moment. "My apologies for the dramatic entrance, ladies and gentlemen!" His English was accented, something rolling and less clipped than a typical Russian accent. He spread his arms in a shrug, a theatrical 'what can you do' gesture. "We had a direct message to get out to a good half dozen people. For the rest of you, I have a much less musical one: Kyshtym was not an accident. Nuclear threats are only as threatening as the security is lax! Those among you who are responsible for cover ups will have all your sins remembered, and the new generation opposing the nuclear push forward should take care with their proceedings. If the blame is not put on the guilty and the program does not continue, we shall be bare forth all your past ugliness and leave not a representative alive with honour to their name. You'll change the system or we will shut it _down_."

With a snap of his fingers, the lights whirled out again, and by the time someone hit the back up generator, he and the others were gone, along with Gi's ring.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note:** Sorry about the delay! My laptop died, but has since been resurrected, so expect regular updates again. Also, if the NSA wasn't watching my activity for the stuff I'd already Googled for this fanfic, they're definitely watching me for what I Googled for this chapter and the next one.

* * *

Zlatan and Linka exchanged looks. He tilted his head and said simply, "I'll be at the usual place if you want to take this madness as a sign to return to your roots. Until then, _pazi sta radis_."

He joined the crowd making their way to the exits, while the blonde stood very still, looking as if she were made of stone, rooted to the spot to weather the storm. Wheeler placed a hand on her shoulder and she looked at him with more fear than he thought she was capable of possessing. He'd always thought of his girlfriend as unshakable, strong, nearly fearless even in the face of the disasters and long odds they faced trying to clean up the planet. They'd fought criminals together, they'd faced Boris' death together and he'd helped her through the aftermath of withdrawal. So if now was the time she wanted to break down, it was more than earned, but even when he wrapped his arms around her, she remained still and silent.

Ma-Ti worked his Ring, calming the crowds enough to avoid a stampede, but the awkward silence remained until Anatoly made his way back to the group, Gi and Kwame en tow. Gi was shamefaced and Kwame was unreadable, which was never a good sign. As horrifying as it had been to watch from afar, Wheeler realized, it had to be a lot worse to have it happen right in front of you. Given Gi's element was the least present here, it made sense they'd grabbed her Ring. It didn't make it any less of a loss, and her hands rubbed and flexed at the place where it should have been. Anatoly was who surprised Wheeler most. Bright, unshed tears were in his eyes, genuine regret contorting his smooth features into something human and vulnerable, and it was so opposite of the know-it-all snarker he'd been dealing with the American didn't know what to say.

"I tripped Zlatan on the stairway – was he up here?" Anatoly barely waited for a nod before continuing. "Okay, one suspect down, that just leaves a few people. Alright, we – we can work with this." He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it in the process, and neither noticed nor cared. "Lenoshka? Look, I know this is entirely my fault but please, please say something. You're scaring me."

She launched herself into his arms, locked onto him and buried her head in his shoulder. "I thought you were dead – that song – they know – and I couldn't live with myself if-"

Anatoly was nearly knocked off kilter by the force of her embrace, but wrapped his arms around her. "No one's dead. No one's hurt, no one's missing, security is sweeping the crowds." He rubbed her back in firm circles, looking immensely relieved himself. "I saw what way he was looking and the way he dropped your name in, I thought – but you're alive. So stop it, we're Russians. We're supposed to be stoic pillars of the northern world," he quipped, weakly, burying his face in her hair immediately afterwards. A shaky sigh passed his lips that held back a sob. "How does your Yankee deal with seeing you in this kind of danger every day?"

"I think," she said, pulling away gently to take Wheeler's hand. "Your _praded_ would say God has a hand in that." Her eyes fell on Gi. "But for now it's more important we get somewhere safe. We cannot go after Gi's Ring in this crowd; Tolyan, Zlatan was wearing-"

"I know. It's been that way since the USSR fell. There are probably more of them in the crowd but they aren't behind this disruption. That accent was distinctly…" he paused, then soldiered on. "It was not any Yugo dialect. Doesn't mean they'd pass up the opportunity to stir things up with your group if they could. The papers would love it."

Gi gave him an exhausted half-glare. "Could you two please explain any of this now that we're in the thick of it?"

He glanced around the crowd and shook his head minimally. "Not until we clear the building. This entire place is an info-leak nightmare on a good night, and it's not a good night. We don't want to run from the wolf and into the maw of a bear, as my _praded_ would say.

Linka overruled him. "Our hotel rooms are not going to be safer than this, not after tonight. Where do you propose we go?"

"Let me put it this way: if your boyfriend didn't like me before, he's going to _hate me_ now."

* * *

The drive to the _ZATO_ in which the greater Yurasov family resided did, indeed, leave Wheeler uneasy, probably because they were picked up by a black van Anatoly had called in on a private line speaking something that was definitely not Russian – if Wheeler had to guess what it was he'd have drawn a blank, but it got them all into the back of an armored van that ambled along through less and less traffic, a ghost in the night.

Gi was curled up against Kwame's side by the halfway point. Apparently they were going out of what most people considered Moscow proper. And Anatoly had been accurate that the idea of a 'closed city', as it was pitched to him by two very tired, high-strung Russians who weren't in the mood to hear Russia critiqued just now, was pretty repugnant. The place was a small town's worth of people of relatively high importance clumped together and protected with gates, guards, sensors and guns against the onslaught of the outside world, safe from crime, living in mansions that ranged from normal to only-in-Russia levels of opulence. It was like a memorial to the wealth disparity and everything wrong with Russian history. While the rest of the population had to deal with overcrowding, limited resources, higher crime rates and any and all environmental backlash that occurred from Russia's questionable choices regarding city planning, the part of the population so small it didn't even make up a percentage was living in the lap of luxury. They even had their own private grocery stores lest they have to go amongst the poor people. Wheeler wasn't sure what the rent was for a place here, but he was going to make a conservative guess his entire old apartment building itself would not have been sufficient down payment.

Apparently, Anatoly's entire family lived here, as was obvious from the fact that he had yet to be addressed as anything other than Gospodin Anatoly Nazarovich since they got into the van. His house was in the center of the city, carefully positioned as if house buying was about strategy. Maybe it was for people with that much money. Wheeler had no idea, but he did take some comfort in the fact that Anatoly looked as miserable to be going there as the American felt about going. The drive was long, security checks numbering three before they got let into the neighborhood proper, and Wheeler really wished Linka would say something instead of glancing between him and her ex as if she expected a fight. She made it rather hard by leaning her head on Anatoly's shoulder while holding onto Wheeler's hand, disarming both of them. Linka rarely let herself be openly seen as vulnerable like this. Ma-Ti looked thoughtful, now that the sickness of being around that many terrified people in a tightly enclosed theatre had worn off. The general consensus was that everyone was both too tired to talk and aware they needed to.

"This is the third worse night of my life," Anatoly muttered, rubbing at his temples. "Maybe fourth. There's a lot of stiff competition to get into the top three. As far as bizarre events go, this tops the list, though."

"I'm sorry-" Linka started, and he shook his head.

"No, tonight is my fault. I know you and I like to debate some of the other things on the list, but this is pretty cut and dry." He sighed, shutting his eyes briefly. "You know, I thought – I really did, even after everything that's happened – that Russia was getting better. That we could start to quit side-eyeing each other and be something nobler, something less us-versus-them."

The blonde bit her lip and looked away. "About that – there are certain things I may have not mentioned to my friends…" When Anatoly sat up straighter to gape at her, betrayed, she ducked her head. "My _babushka_ is very Orthodox and Mikhail is somewhat Catholic thanks to his girlfriend. It seemed easier to let people think what they would."

"But you're _dating_ him," Anatoly objected as if this made his case for him, gesturing to Wheeler, who was now lost. "What were you going to do, wait until the wedding night? Besides, he's American. They're all mixed like stews."

"Uh, babe, what is he talking about?" Wheeler asked, looking at the way his girlfriend and her ex were staring at each other.

Anatoly pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to breathe. Linka refused to look at her ex as she said awkwardly, "My father was Jewish. My mother, she was something of an atheist, but people still – they didn't take it well. In some parts of Russia it still isn't taken well."

"In some parts of Russia," her ex put in scathingly, " _You_ can take it perfectly well and your family doesn't and clearly _that's_ the bit that matters."

"We are not having this fight again, Tolyan," she snapped at him, too tired to go through this again, and shifted to lean against Wheeler instead. "I wasn't going to run off to Novosibirsk to live in a big empty home like I had something to hide-"

"You ran off to a _heretofore undiscovered_ _island_ and hid _yourself_ ," he pointed out incredulously. "I am many things but damn it, I am _not_ responsible for that. That was your idea! And now you're still lying, because you might've failed to mention a very critical detail there." When she folded her arms, he added, "Your father's name is on record, they can learn it from the press," he gestured to the group on the word 'they', "Or from you. Who do you think is going to give an accurate, unbiased opinion on the subject?"

Linka looked at him, and Wheeler wondered if this was what it had been like when they were a couple, hugging earlier, sniping at each other later. "My father was Serbian and he wanted me to find a nice Serbian man like Zlatan, who he introduced me to for that purpose because Papa was a terrible judge of character and might have been involved with the wrong people once or twice. There, is that good enough for you?"

His anger crumpled into something intense and mournful. "You've always been more than good enough for me. I just don't know why I wasn't enough for you."

The van stopped and Linka was the first to exit, leaving the question unanswered.

* * *

Outside of Moscow, Dr. Blight watched her business partner descend on the victory dinner she'd brought him like it was five star gourmet food and not the roast beef sandwich it actually was.

He was cute, naïve and nicer than she'd really acknowledged. The realization set poorly with her considering what they were going to do, yet in that moment, eagerly licking dressing off his fingers, making ridiculous noises of appreciation and savoring every bite as if it were the stuff of legend, he seemed infinitely younger. His angular features were softened by a smile that was innocent and genuine, his orange eyes made soft in the relative darkness in which they sat, even his lack of manners more reminiscent of someone just unacquainted with the concept rather than someone who was trying to be rude. When he was finished he laid back on the bed, hands over his stomach, so content he seemed almost another creature from the one who'd threatened to tear Russia and the Planeteers apart earlier. His smile was blissful, unhindered by worry or heavy thoughts. She wondered if she'd _ever_ been like that.

She placed a thickly gloved hand on his shoulder, unnerved by the ease at which she could feel bone underneath her hand. He in and of himself was too radioactive to be near without the gear, but Dr. Blight had to admit to a certain fondness for both his ruthlessness and the efficiency… and whatever this was, this less aggressive, less dangerous mode he'd slipped into. Ever since they got back from their opening move, he'd been more relaxed, demure, even. His orange eyes opened, meeting hers without malice. Tangerine, she decided, was the closest shade of orange to what he had. It was the best word to do the color justice. She was still getting used to how unnatural they looked on a human being. Technically, radiation being what it was, he wasn't quite human anymore. He was just close enough to either be unnerving or intriguing depending on the moment.

"I'm glad you contacted us," he admitted, smiling shyly. "Even though most of my people won't go near outsiders, I think you're different. This was a really nice treat, and I'm getting to see so much of the world… I don't think you're dangerous like the others said. You could save us."

"You saved yourself out there tonight," she countered easily. His hair was thick and had a hint of waviness to it. She wondered if all their haircuts were done for efficiency's sake, too. Everything else seemed to be. "I just gave the stage directions. It'll get harder from here on out, pal."

He sat up on his elbows. Given her perch on the edge of the bed, it brought them to eye level. "Why don't you use my name? Is it because of all the forms of Russian formal address? I'm not hung up on all that stuff, you know. You can just call me Illarion. "

Dr. Blight studied his face for a moment, almost disarmed by how open he was once there weren't efficiency monitors and other people around. "I'm trying not to get too attached to something temporary."

When they were done destabilizing the country or at least putting it into an order that they could both repeatedly exploit, they _had_ to go their separate ways. He was radioactive enough that he left a trail, which was why he had to ride to Moscow in a specially made container. She couldn't count on even the best gear keeping out his toxicity permanently; being around him was equal parts expensive and bad for her health. They could probably swing this job, but past that, there wasn't any future for them. Given how much chaos he set off in under two minutes, it was a shame. Illarion was the sort of lackey she could use, crafty and creative, bizarre, flashy and genuinely hard to predict. He also had a family, a city, a life that he'd fought for since he was born, one that didn't have room in it for someone like her. His existence was purely lived out in the shadows while she made headlines regularly. His nose scrunched up, dark, thin eyebrows hunkering down.

"We could make this a permanent business venture. You'd be a hero to some people," Illarion said, thus demonstrating just how badly he'd misjudged her if he thought that was remotely appealing to her. "And think of all the tech you could make without any laws stopping you! You could do anything. We could change the future, together."

"Kid… Illarion," she tried out the name uncertainly, aware of their proximity suddenly and uncomfortable with it, "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We've got a big day ahead of us tomorrow. Just try to get some sleep."

He nodded, but she could feel his eyes follow her as she left.

* * *

Nazar Yurasov was an imposing man in his own way – there was something cruel in his smiles and cold in his eyes that never failed to leave people unnerved, and in all the time Linka had known him he had never once lost his cool. If he was angry at someone he grew, if anything, more composed, not less, his low voice a deep and steady thrum of words that were never uncertain. He had not survived the regime change he'd witnessed in his lifetime by being kind or emotional, and had certainly not seized the power he had without accumulating some skeletons in his closet.

But now she outranked him and so Linka opened the door to his office with confidence, taking in his appearance with critical eyes, unafraid to challenge him over tonight's events. He was lean and tall like his son, with the same thick red hair that had white streaks at the temples, yet his eyes were nothing like his son's, a cold steel blue that was reflective and piercing. As a child she had been scared of him, of the way he looked at her and her father with calculations running through his head. He tolerated her friendship with Anatoly because it was to his political advantage to have an ear to the ground regarding Serbian-Russian ethnic tensions and because he distrusted Jews. The second her father had died she was no longer useful, only allowed around to keep an eye on her own political allegiances or lack thereof. She became a way to gauge political support for environmentalism. All the days she'd known him, he was determined to use her as much as he used everyone else he knew, and even his own grandfather had said one day that attitude would catch up to him.

That day had come. "Kyshtym. Tell me everything about it," she demanded, staring into his merciless eyes with fire in hers.

He folded his arms on his desk as if a Planeteer barging in on his office was normal. "I don't know anything more about Kyshtym than anyone else. It was a terrible accident, but I was four. All I know is that my father went to work one day and never came back."

"Which must have been politically convenient for some people," she prodded. Nazar nodded, once. "Tell me."

"There's nothing to tell. As I said, it was before my time so unless this has some relevance of some kind to the present-"

After years of being talked down to by this man, it felt good to watch his boundless confidence falter for a fraction of a second when she said, "Thugs stormed the Bolshoi Theatre tonight, took the stage and said it wasn't an accident. They evaded all security, did not show up on cameras, stole a Planeteer's Ring and know all my family's secrets. Which means they may know _yours_ , so if only to save your own selfish soul, you will start talking."

For a moment his eyes narrowed, his usual response to being startled. He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. "People have been making that allegation for years. This is a bit more violent than usual, but I doubt even the newly-minted 'free media' will be able to turn anything up. Your precious team should be fine and it shouldn't take long for my sources to figure out who the latest pitiful attempt at regime shakers are." He turned back to his work, apparently satisfied the conversation was over. "Now if you'll leave me alone, I have pressing matters to attend to."

" _Wind!_ "

The blast knocked him out of his chair and onto the ground, papers flying upwards in wild circles as the whirlwind swept the room. She stormed over to his stunned form, grabbed the keys to his cabinet out of his hand and got to work opening it, the lock giving way to reveal a number of safes, some of which Anatoly had mentioned had only the keys in them to other safes or to locked doors in the house. Having spent years dealing with Nazar's forcibly cultured and overtly classist attitudes, she was able to locate the safe she wanted – it was marked Lermontov after his favorite and most depressing Russian classical writer – and took a singular and correct guess at the code to crack it. 13, after Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker, 66, after the waltz from Sleeping Beauty, and 20, after the section of Swan Lake he was in love with. She chose them in order of how much he had lorded them over her the Russian superiority of each over Serbian music. Genuinely shocked at the astronomical odds of anyone making those guesses correctly, he was several seconds too late to keep her from grabbing a thick, leather-bound journal from inside the safe.

 _Zinoviy Evgeniyevich Yursaov, 1954-1957_ was embossed on the front. It was shockingly well preserved. She looked at Nazar with a hurricane in her eyes just daring him to speak, then flipped it open. A picture fell to the floor, having long been trapped inbetween the pages. She picked it up and stared, confusion clouding her face.

The man in the picture beside Zinoviy was the man from the Bolshoi.


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's Note:** I don't know how often I can apologize for the length between updates before it sounds insincere. I genuinely am sorry, for the record. Real life got a bit hectic and I had the hardest time figuring out how many clues to things I could put in here without it being obnoxious. The thing is, though, although this chapter needs polishing, I know if I go over it again and again it'll never get published. So I'm very sorry for my flawed work, but extremely grateful for the support and encouragement I get from those who read, review, and even care about this little fic enough to send me PMs! It's incredibly humbling to know that this story is actually interesting to some of you, and I will never be able to express accurately how much I appreciate this fandom as a whole. Please be aware I am trying my best, because you as readers make me want to be a better writer.

* * *

Evgeniy Yurasov, Anatoly's _praded_ and a man who was essentially the emotional core of his very dysfunctional family, had ordered everyone to bed.

There were plenty of objections, but somehow, lectured at, scolded, and with threats to call their parents, they all ended up in guest rooms within the hour. Linka had refused to hand over the journal, but was satisfied he wouldn't let Nazar somehow confiscate it during the night. Nazar had hit up the vodka immediately, hard, and retreated to the master bedroom muttering about violent Serbs and greedy Jews, making Anatoly wince and give the vodka a longing look as Wheeler had to be restrained by Kwame. The American was at his limit. _Everyone_ was at or, in the case of Linka, well past their limits. If only for the sake of processing things, they needed to spend some time forcibly parted from each other, with Anatoly making a retreat to hush his younger sister and put her back to sleep without letting her in on the absolute mess this night had been. The rest of them were upstairs getting very little sleep, gazing at paintings, the ceiling or the windows with remarkable views and feeling bone tired.

Wheeler had been given a room thankfully several doors away from Linka's. This allowed him to lay back and try to remember how to _breathe_. After punching the pillows, kicking the bed hard enough to shake the intricate carved and ancient wood foundation of the canopy bed, and then screaming into the largest pillow until his throat was sore, he sank down to the floor, breathless. He wished he had someone to talk to who could tell him what on Earth he was supposed to do right now, what he was supposed to be feeing, but mostly he just felt too many things – hurt, angry, stunned, lost, overwhelmed, scared – to process any of them. This was never going to be an easy trip, he'd known that, he just hadn't expected any of _this_. He'd known Anatoly was Linka's ex, that had been weird and he'd been jealous and still, still, despite that, he'd thought it was _just_ going to be a rough few days.

He had not processed the fact Linka had almost married the guy yet before the world threw the rest of it at him: another ex arranged by her father, her father the possible criminal, her father the Jewish man, the Serbian man, the one whose heritage turned Nazar Yurasov into an obstacle between Anatoly and Linka, Linka who had lied by omission, who had never mentioned any of this to him before, who he had trusted with his own past and problems, with his entire life-

Wheeler rarely got so angry he cried but this time it was more like he was so betrayed his body defaulted to what it did when angry as a child, when completely without a way out. There was too much, too much information without context and too many things that played his insecurities like a fiddle, then this, this being thrown into the deep end all at once. Anatoly was a mixture of signals, of both 'not over it' and 'needs closure' that gave Wheeler the distinct impression the Russian was as lost as he was. The guy certainly had a right to be. Linka had always been more complex than people usually saw, but whatever propelled her to take the actions she did regarding romance was beyond anyone's full understanding. She could clamp down on the past in ways he'd never imagined and he just could not understand how she hadn't said anything to him. How had she never mentioned any of it to him when they were not just dating but incredibly serious at this point? He loved her, he was terrified to say the words I love you, and _he'd said them anyway._

He had tried so hard to be a better person than he used to be yet it wasn't good enough. His gut instinct said there was a reason, that someone had hurt her, that it was likely one of her two exes, and he wasn't entirely sure if answers were going to make up for being left in the dark for so long.

Everything had made perfect sense in his world last week. Now it didn't, so he sat there and stared at the painting on the wall, hating both the fact this family could afford things like that to decorate their second home and the fact his family couldn't afford a house. On some level he'd always known half of Linka's family had money, but she'd spent more time with the part that hadn't, could recall days spent in a mining town with her brother and a girl from her school named Inna who was her partner in exploring the forest and getting into mild trouble. Those weren't lies, of course, those were just also not the entire truth. Those weren't everything to her. He wondered if she was used to this, to nights at the Bolshoi spent in a fancy dress, to private homes in closed cities, to micro lands of plenty in a country with an overwhelming struggle with poverty that was half of what toppled the USSR in the first place. Hunger, religion, and a right to their own land was what kept the living, breathing beast of conflict in the former Yugoslavia going as the Planeteers carefully avoided a conflict they knew they couldn't solve. Anatoly had likely never been hungry a day in his life or gone to school where people carried weapons under their hoodies. He could have given Linka a perfect fairytale romance without the worries of money or safety crossing her mind.

Ma-Ti's voice rang in his head as Wheeler got up and examined every inch of the overly expensive décor. _Linka chose you over him._ His fingers trailed down French silverwork on a mirror frame that probably cost more than his family made in a week. Linka had left all this behind. The gold lacquer painted walls, the thick Dagestani rugs, the real fur comforters, the painting done on canvas and in a Chukchi knot-and-spiral work frame, all these little luxuries that other people spent their lives striving towards, she had turned down. She was still actively turning Anatoly down. She wasn't perfect, but neither was Wheeler, was he? She had every right to feel conflicted about being a double minority in a place like this – in any place at all, actually.

Wheeler had, when he was younger, had a magnificent third grade teacher, a man who saw the early signs of Auditory Processing Disorder in Wheeler and worked on it with him after school. One hour every day devoted to fighting a learning disability that he barely understood, carefully bringing his skills up to par, and all Wheeler's father could see was 'one of _those_ ' people. Half Lenape tribe, half mostly-black with blue eyes that surfaced from some ancient point in his genetics, he was beloved by his students, but no matter how hard he worked no one ever gave him the credit they gave to the white teachers or even to the black ones. And every year he'd endured with poise and grace and breathtaking loneliness, isolated in the city that never slept, alone in crowds.

Linka just didn't want to get hurt like that at the beginning. After that, well, when was there ever a good time to tell someone you'd been lying to them? He couldn't imagine what it was like to be afraid of everyone, all the time. No wonder she had said she was Soviet when they first met. Russian would've been a complete lie but if someone had asked Wheeler back then about ethnic subgroups in Slavic countries, he wouldn't have been able to name three. He didn't have to stretch his mind to imagine the kind of things people probably said to her about being Jewish. He'd had friends from Jewish families and had seen them endure a thousand little micro-insults every day. People had limits and Linka was only a person like anybody else.

That didn't answer some of the more burning questions going through his head, but it was enough to make him sit down, breathe, and try to get some sleep, even if it meant staring down the creepy painting in the room. He kept telling himself that she'd explain when it was morning. As morning light crept into the room and illuminated the walls and small chandelier, he also decided he was going to make a concentrated effort to try to get along with Anatoly. He wasn't going to be like his old man and start conflicts where there could have been progress.

Tired, bored, he turned to the painting and nearly broke his brain working out the Cyrillic title into the Western alphabet and then spent a good half a minute with his eyes screwed shut trying to translate three words of Russian. _The Soldier And Death_ , the inlaid metal plaque proclaimed. He gave up on trying to figure out the Russian cursive of the painter's name and studied it closely, because it wasn't the only copy of this work he'd seen in this place. Something about it struck him as important, thought for the life of him, he couldn't remember why.

" _American fairytales are strange," Linka had said, frowning as she thumbed through the books at the inner city library they'd helped provide. "I can find some stories here from many places in Europe, but none from Russia."_

" _Babe, most people here just want to have access to_ something _for their kids. I don't think they were picking anything on purpose when they asked for our help – what are you doing?"_

 _She browsed through the titles, mouth working silently as it did when she had to speed-read in her second language. "Nyet, it is nothing. I just can't picture my Babushka reading me any of this. I suppose if we ever have children I will just ask her for my old books."_

 _A thrill went through him, electrifying and slightly stunning, like any time she mentioned the possibility of being with him that long without it being sarcastic. "What stories did you want?" He wanted her to keep talking, to keep envisioning a future with her even though they'd be back to their usual snide remarks in a moment._

" _Mm." She tilted her head, considering. "Maybe less romances. I am not ready to be a grandmother," she declared, sharing a smile with Wheeler as he reached above her to put more advanced kids' books on the shelves. "Ah, what else… Masha And The Wolves," she started, listing things thoughtfully, "Tili-tili bom, maybe. The Giant Turnip, Old Man Winter, The Wise Little Girl, and The Soldier And Death, definitely."_

" _Wow. I don't even know where to start – the turnips or the death thing." He had wrapped an arm around her, pecking her cheek affectionately to show he wasn't being critical. "None of that's going to end in nightmares, is it?"_

 _She laughed. "Most old fairytales are a little scary. But no, they should be fine. I used to get very sad about the soldier and Misha would say I was missing the point."_

 _He pictured a tiny, blonde and stubborn little girl swatting at her brother and grinned. "Yeah, well, you're the person Gaia picked out as a superhero, not him. What's it about, anyway? Besides the obvious."_

" _There once was a soldier who, returning home, showed great kindness upon a beggar – agh, I will never be able to tell it like my Babushka. It's about a man who captures the woman who is the spirit of Death in a magical bag and tries to fix the world."_

" _What happens to him?" Now he was interested despite himself._

 _Linka sighed. "Things go very wrong, so eventually he lets her out. She-"_

The soldier in the painting was being kissed by the spirit of Death, who loved him for his intentions but could not leet him live for the destruction his actions had wrought. She cupped his pale face in her cool brown hands, thumbs brushing away tears. All around him, the world seemed to be post-apocalyptic, with people horribly burned, some of them reduced to skeletons, the ground reduced to the smooth looking texture of glass save for rubble, a house in the background bearing the shadowy outlines of people mid-motion as if they were supposed to be there and hadn't been painted in for some reason. Above the figures the sky was an eerie red-brown, inescapable and suffocating the sunlight out of their world. Wheeler studied the painting for a long moment before something clicked into place.

The fiery cloud behind the soldier and Death was in a mushroom cloud shape.

He stared hard at the date in the corner. _June 12th, 1908._

* * *

"Water! Water! Why is this not working?!" Dr. Blight rounded on her companion, who stood behind a small blast shield dome made of the best materials money could buy to block out radiation. "I thought you said you cleaned it!"

He looked at her, unblinking. "Of course I did. My people only survive by selling what we can clean." Ignoring the fact that statement unnerved her – she imagined the more normal looking of his people visiting a once radiation-free area and spreading it like a contagion without any regret – he continued, "We've never had anything we can't make radiation free. Except ourselves, of course; organic matter is different. The Ring is fine."

"Then why isn't it working for me?" she snapped, making him tilt his head thoughtfully. That he might actually have an answer was the only reason this wasn't more frustrating. "Did you use it last night?"

"No. I wasn't sure why 'Gaia' didn't stop me taking it, I really didn't want to accidentally summon her or something." Illarion frowned. "Maybe you have to have a specific idea of what you want it to do for it to work?"

She turned to the buckets of water they'd hauled out for this purpose, and envisioned the water forming a solid jet of liquid. "Water!"

Not a drop even quivered.

"Basha," he said gently, throwing her for a moment with the intimacy of the nickname, "Maybe we should take a break and go over our research again. Or we could have breakfast and see if we made the news – well, if I did, anyway. That should put you in a good mood and if you have more energy, it's easier to focus. Efficiency and productivity come from accounting for variables and reviewing what didn't work."

"I can't eat breakfast with you… Ilya," she tried out the nickname and his whole face lit up, like the dawn breaking through the crowds. The earnestness made her look away, oddly flattered and unsure of what to do with that feeling. "If I could, I'd take you to a diner already just for the entertainment value."

Illarion stood bolt upright, turning to her with genuine emotion over something she'd forgotten to view as a luxury a long time ago: food. Whatever the food situation was in the city beneath the abandoned nuclear disaster site, it was, she had gathered, very limited in range and unfulfilling. The way he reacted to literally anything she let him have was like she was showering him with diamonds and gold, and quite frankly for someone who had managed to mug a Planeteer, poison several key Russian officials and who'd murdered other members of his own people for not being productive and contributing enough to their society, it was wildly misplaced. Dr. Blight had signed up to work with a monster, not a kid whose greatest joy in life was the idea of seconds at dinner. At the same time, she had to admit there was a certain charm to seeing him analyze the food afterwards the same way some people might discuss a musical piece, going over the names of ingredients like foreign words.

"What's a diner?" he asked, derailing her from the entire subject of the Ring.

She wanted to be sharp with him and failed. "A place people go out to eat with their friends when they don't want to cook at home."

He leaned back and tried to picture it. "How much food is there, there?"

"As much as you can pay for or eat."

The stunned look on his face made her shoulders go slack. "Ah, Hell. When we're on our way out and we don't have to keep a low profile I'll take you to one. My treat." He put his hand up to the glass. After a moment, she signed, walked over and placed her hand against it. Through the cool glass she could feel the warmth of his body radiating out. She tried to decipher his gaze for a long moment before smiling. "Alright, enough. Come on, break time. I could really use a glass of water."

The content of the buckets behind her rushed upwards into the sky and burst down in a brief two-second spattering of fine, soft rain. In the early morning light it caught the sun beautifully, sparkling around their stunned forms.

Illarion cheered while Blight slowly took her hand from the glass and pressed it over her heart. It was scorching, but she was fairly certain that wasn't responsible for the warm feeling inside.

* * *

When Anatoly's mother had killed herself, the most emotion his father could bring himself to show was to keep saying, with various degrees of hatred, guilt, confusion, and loss, "I miscalculated." He'd said it thousands of times, sober and drunk, as if the very idea was too much to take, as if everything had been a math problem he had done in his head and gotten wrong. That was a long time ago, and it was the last time Anatoly had truly seen his father act like a decent human being, lonely, lost, unable to process loss. How could he, when he might have been responsible for it? He'd been the youngest of five and his brothers and sisters had gotten themselves tangled up in all the wrong politics, but their deaths were their own faults. Nazar could handle throwing the blame at someone else. He could not take the idea of being _to_ blame.

When his son had announced his intention to marry that Jewish half-breed with the Serbian name, he'd immediately had a number of people to put the blame on: Linka for making him forget his right mind, Boris for being a burden of a friend and a traitor to a perfectly good Russian bloodline, Ovdotya from school binding her friends together like a pack and keeping Anatoly in the presence of people beneath his station, and of course Anatoly himself for not knowing better than to lower himself in the first place. He'd expressed all of this and watched his son grow to hate him in mere minutes. But the Yurasov family was good at using people, especially each other. He knew bringing the Planeteers here gave them safety while also laying a heavy burden on his father. If Nazar let them stay he was the noble man who helped shelter superheroes. If he didn't he was a monster, to the press and to the people. It was the greatest way to tell him that he would continue 'lowering' himself to mix with the downtrodden and the worst of the ethnicities and races of the Earth for as long as he drew breath. He was playing his father like a card and all Nazar could do was wait now for that to either backfire spectacularly if his son decided to let his crazy Serbian ex rip the past up by its' roots to see what she'd find.

Breakfast was magnificently tense, off to an immediately perfect start when Anatoly passed around copies of four different newspapers and launched into the history of gangs, ethnic tensions and pro and anti nuclear sentiment from the head of the table. Nazar almost didn't mind seeing his son in his chair, the desperation was so palpable. Unfortunately, as he was a citizen of Moscow as well, he couldn't let it all blow up in his son's face and put him in his place, much as it would be incredibly satisfying. Snatching a copy of a paper from his son's hands, he skimmed it with begrudging interest.

"Some eco-villain – pithy little term you've all coined there, by the way – is behind this. The Molniyas would have this paper hinting at them if they'd done it just out of sheer lack of subtlety. Hand me that other one," he demanded, hungover and tired of being awake already. "Hmm. This is a dead giveaway that the Otrovanos aren't behind it. They're trying too hard to frame themselves on too little evidence. For once, we can rule the Serbs out." Ignoring how Linka bristled, he was unable to ignore his son 'accidentally' knocking over a bottle of very expensive vodka as he reached for the next paper to hand him. "Ukrainians might be misblamed for it. They're a tragically easy target. Fortunately for them they had Shostakov in the audience; everyone knows he's too fond of Linka from your disturbingly depraved school days to be there and _not_ immediately try to save her if he'd known something was going on."

Linka sighed. "You know very well that nothing ever happened between myself and Petruso Shostakov."

"Which is a shame." Nazar shrugged. "He's perfectly poised to make more than my son or your American ever will. If I were a woman and single I would have picked that option and put the profits in a Swiss bank for when the government decides he's just the wrong side of too-brilliant." The entire room looked at him with disdain and horror, but since that was the norm, he shrugged again. "Tactical errors aside, which of your madmen and bizarre caricatures would have any investment in propelling the nuclear initiative forward? After all, if people think there were no accidents, only deliberate malfunctions, their faith in the safety of such things will skyrocket."

Anatoly eyed his father carefully. "Why are you being helpful? You're too sober to be nice."

Nazar picked a vatrushka off a platter in the middle of the table, irritated they were using the good china and taking up his well-maintained and painstakingly cultivated Baroque style dining room. "I want all of you out of my house as soon as possible and I have no desire to see if this family's integrity can survive another round of government inquisition, which will come if this heats up any further." He took a bite, shaking his head slightly as he chewed. "Don't mistake this for some well hidden bleeding heart; I would just like it if my grandfather didn't have to bury _all_ of his firstborn's children."

"For you to have a bleeding heart, you'd need to have a heart at all," his son muttered, adding just low enough for him to hear, "And if you did, my mother would be here right now." Leaving his father frozen in shock at the audacity of that comment, he turned to the Planeteers, sighing. "I have to go to the office and see what wolves are at the door there. But when you figure out the likely culprits, all of you have been put on emergency clearance for the entire building. Just go and I'll be available."

He spun on his heel and left his father seething in his wake, meaning the morning wasn't a total loss after all.


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's Note:** Well this chapter is super late, overly long, overly angsty, badly dramatic and I'm probably on some kind of FBI watchlist for all the research into nuclear accidents and the like I've done. I feel like I owe all of you a refund even though fanfic is free. But the only way out is through, so with continued thanks for your support, I present to you the latest chapter in this strange love story set against the backdrop of Russian folklore, post-Soviet paranoia and Cold War nuclear tech.

(Also yes for those wondering, The Soldier And Death is both a real folktale and a real painting. Many paintings, actually, but the one that eerily looks like a detonated nuke went off in it that was painted in 1908 was bought by various nobles, ended up in the hands of Lenin, and then was sold off and lost to history at some point. The less creepy explanation for the background being so post-nuclear looking is that mere months before Russia experienced a meteor impact of sorts called the Tunguska Event. This doesn't explain the mushroom cloud, however, and if you go looking, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about that. Personally the folktale is more interesting to me than the painting, but both worked well as an eerie real life thing to shove into the fic.)

* * *

Linka waited for an opportunity to snag Wheeler and take him aside, but she was a little busy at breakfast frantically reading everything that mentioned her name, thoughts of her father running through her head.

He was a good man, but it had been hard to support a family in their situation, where there was so much distrust on the part of their in-laws and no better support came from former friends. Russia was a complicated and sprawling country he was never fully able to assimilate into, so he had turned to those he thought could help for the money to get Linka into a more open minded school, a better place, at Moscow. It was not a secret the money came from _somewhere_ dubious, yet no one in their family said a word about it to him. He had proved his willingness to take care of his family, although Misha had an argument with him in private about morality that had been one of many contributing factors to his hair going gray far earlier than it should have. Once or twice he'd been gone all night and come back with no explanations, the unspoken knowledge he was out repaying his debts through actions keeping his wife and mother in-law up at night. Then one night he'd left and they'd gotten a call from the police to come identify the body, and that was that.

She loved her father. He had been caught in a position that had forced him into crime, but the papers weren't going to see it that way. Linka remembered being young and hearing people murmur about him as if he wasn't fluent in Russian. _That's the Serb, isn't it?_ Babushkas would whisper back and forth to each other. _Look at how pale he is! Like snow. Sickly thing, they shouldn't live in cities like this._ Those were the kinder words. Fathers with their families had harsher ones. _Hold the children close – you know how Serbs get when they're angry. I don't see a wife. He probably beats her. Is that little one his? I don't think she is. Call the police? Maybe. We'll see if she speaks Serbian first…_ She learned when she was young how her father could square his shoulders against the confrontational voices, turn his eyes away from the whispers he could clearly hear, and she recalled when a particular insult pierced the veneer of calm indifference he tried so hard to put up. She remembered him talking to her grandmother once, smelling of vodka but sober, fragments of broken glass in his hair from when a fellow bar patron had broken a bottle over his head. He'd been out with a few Jewish friends commemorating the birth of a friend's child, and they'd gotten a little too loud. The 'real' Russians had thrown them out, but not without a fight.

The papers gave her usual bio with no mention of her parents beyond that they were dead. She breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Then she leaned her head against Wheeler's shoulder and wished she'd had a restful night's sleep. All she'd managed was a few hours of a fitful nightmare about Zlatan, as if she needed that right now with everything else going on. It had been a tragic mistake on her father's part to assume that she would be safer with a Serbian man, though she understood his logic. The only Russian who had ever shown him real kindness was the one he had married; the rest were uncertainties he hadn't known how to protect her from. He simply hadn't known that Zlatan was so given to bursts of anger and the first time it happened Linka had honestly thought it was the fault of the vodka Zlatan had drunk. The second time, he had been sober but horrified and did everything to try to make it up to her. The third time had made her bolt for Anatoly, who had convinced her to drop Zlatan while she still could, before things got worse. Anatoly had suggested she date Shostakov, given the Ukrainian was both interested in her and remarkably sensitive. It would have made sense to do so given he was Jewish. That was when Linka had kissed Anatoly for the first time, surprising him with the suddenness of it before his arms had wrapped protectively around her. She didn't want safe and secure, she wanted respected and loved.

Linka never did go with the smart thing to do when it came to love. Neither had her father. Given that Mikhail was dating a Catholic girl with Chukchi heritage, it was apparently genetic. Their poor grandmother was exhausted with them by the time Linka started dating Wheeler; all she'd said was to make sure he made her happy. Time had taught her grandmother the bitter lesson that she could embrace the decisions her daughter and then her grandchildren made or she could refute them and lose out on precious, irreplaceable moments with them.

Anatoly was bitterly well versed in the fact his father would not put aside his prejudices like Linka's family would, but that was another train of thought for another day, preferably one where they weren't in the middle of a crisis.

"Zarm can't be involved," Ma-Ti decided, the conversation about who it could be having devolved into 'who can we cross off the list'. "I would have sensed him even at a distance. It was hard to sense the man on stage, but it's hard _not_ to get sensory overload from Zarm."

Gi gave him a look, curious. "That man was hard to sense? Did you try to use your Ring?"

He fidgeted, uncomfortable. "I wanted to see what his intentions were. All I could get from him was that he was present and thinking, but everything else was foggy. It is hard to describe. I felt like he was miles away when he was right there. After a few seconds trying to read him I became weak, tired. I could not continue."

"Don't try that again," Wheeler advised, worried. "We need you, little buddy. And if these guys are going after Rings, then all of us are targets now." He paused. "Is there a way to go up against your Ring on purpose?"

"No." Ma-Ti shook his head, pushing away his plate as if the memory had made him lose his appetite. "Most of the eco-villains are only a little harder to read than a normal person, and I know they are _trying_. I do not think that man even knew I was looking at him. He was not trying to keep me out. It is just in his nature. Normally I only have such problems around severe pollution."

Linka drummed her fingers on the table, thoughtfully. "So he is… polluted?" That hardly made any sense even under the circumstances. "Perhaps that is why Gaia cannot track down Gi's Ring, but what could cause such a thing?"

"Perhaps the very thing we came here to discuss in the first place," Kwame stated solemnly, holding up a paper that had pictures of the site of the Kyshtym disaster in its' black and white, old-timey state, before and after the accident. "Radiation weakens Captain Planet. Perhaps it can weaken us when we use our powers too close to it."

The Russian reached out to take the paper from him. "Well, he is too young to be a survivor of Kyshtym, but he could be a Pripyat – pardon me, Chernobyl, survivor. Evacuations were not as swift for outlying areas, after all. His accent was not Ukrainian like most from those area would have, but he seemed to be making a threat at those who caused the disasters, if people truly did cause them and they were not accidents." She studied the pictures, remembering the picture in Zinoviy Yurasov's journal. "Hold on, I have something I want the rest of you to see." Taking the journal out of her bag, where she had kept it safe from Nazar's greedy hands, she passed the photograph around. "This is Anatoly's grandfather. He was a nuclear physicist with experience in nuclear engineering who died at Kyshtym."

Unnerved silence descended upon the room. Beside Zinoviy in the picture was the man from last night, with somewhat darker eyes, dressed like a fellow scientist. They were huddled over some schematic blocked by their notebooks and scratch papers full of calculations, situated in a room full of other such tables and people. Zinoviy was listening intently while his colleague had a smirk on his face and a glint in his eyes, clearly lecturing him on something. But while the man in the picture had more of a human look without the orange tint to his eyes, the black and white photograph did not show a different man, not entirely or fully, just a very slightly younger one.

Wheeler looked over at the journal in her hands and tried to use his admittedly awful skills at Russian to parse the name together. "And that's his journal? What's it say?"

"Mostly, not much," she admitted, shrugging and opening it. "I read some of it last night. Zinoviy was very naïve about the implications of nuclear power. He thought it would help bring Russia out of the poverty so many parts of the country struggled with and allow for a better overall quality of life. He was very OCD, as an American might put it. At least, he was about making sure everything was safe and there were failsafes for each failsafe, to keep his era's nuclear expansion program going and to protect the people he worked with. He made checklists of checklists and worked hard for a dream of a better future. In his mind Russia would be saved, poverty wiped out and world peace achieved through nuclear power and its' myriad uses."

"And his son is _that_ much of a jerk?" the American asked, raising his eyebrows. "What, does altruism skip generations?" She flipped a page, and his brow furrowed. "Is that a design for something?"

"There are many designs in here. Miniature nuclear generators, nuclear batteries, nuclear heating systems that utilize the waste and runoff for energy gathering – he loses me every time he writes about such things, and Russian is my mother tongue," Linka confessed, passing the journal to an interested Gi, who was by far the most technical minded among them. "He was a genius who was looking to better the world, so, not unreasonably, the government seemed to fear for his life. There were many guards on the site he worked at, every phone call in the area was monitored, and he could not inform anyone he was leaving when he visited home. Very typical Cold War era secrecy."

Gi thumbed through the designs, studying each with an eye for detail. "A lot of this looks like it would work. Why aren't these all in use? I don't agree with using nuclear power for so many things, but these are incredible scientific breakthroughs. We should know about these already."

"I don't know. Nazar has had the journal in his possession for a long time, which is just more confusing. Someone who loves money that much should have tried to capitalize on all this much earlier," the blonde noted thoughtfully, though she did give a moment's thought to how he'd said he had more important matters to attend to last night.

No doubt if the nuclear initiative went through he would bring his father's journal to the attention of the government and make some profit off the labor of others. Until then, though, he had kept it close like any son would the only possession of his father's he had from that time. Much of the journal was about Zinoviy missing his children and his wife, about how he loved each of them, about little things he had managed to get and send home to them despite the watchful eyes of the guards. Nazar was heartless _now_ , of course, but he hadn't always been. He drank away his guilt because he did in fact feel some for the things he'd done to stay rich and powerful. At some point, she realized, even villains were little boys with fathers who loved them dearly. Even he had once been a four year old who had to be told there was an accident and his father was never coming home, with the added baggage of being unable to talk about it to anyone because it was a classified assignment. She picked at her food, mind teetering on the edge of an important breakthrough. Something was wrong here. The whole assignment was classified from start to finish and Ozyorsk, the city where the Kyshtym disaster had taken place, was a closed city so secret it hadn't been on the maps at the time of the accident.

How had Nazar gotten his father's journal?

* * *

When Gaia appeared in Anatoly's office, he jumped, but given he hadn't yelped like the first time she appeared, he was going to count this as a victory.

She'd come to him once before to convince him to allow the Planeteers to have influence on the nuclear initiate proposal. If he'd realized she meant she would be sending his ex-girlfriend directly to him, he wouldn't have agreed. Gaia had made it sound as if they'd just be giving their input from afar. He wasn't angry with her; she was right, they really did need to be here. He was more annoyed with himself that he hadn't managed to see it coming despite having come from a long line of manipulative, lying, play-on-words, silver-tongued people. Anatoly's only comfort was that, given that she was as ancient as the world itself, she'd had more experience talking people into things than he possibly could. At least she used her powers for good. Straightening his tie, he sat up, folded his hand on his desk and tried to look less tired than he felt.

"I am so, so sorry for last night," he said immediately, sincerely disappointed in himself. "I take full responsibility for the events at the Bolshoi."

She made a 'mm' sound Anatoly remembered his mother making when he was a child. It informed him he'd answered wrongly but for the right reasons. "I know you do. You always have been too willing to be everyone's scapegoat. Maybe if you weren't, I would've made you a Planeteer."

The young official tried to envision the responsibility. "That would have been a horrible mistake, honestly. Too politically loaded. So, what can I do for you?"

"You know," Gaia answered at her own pace, the same as the first time she'd astral projected into his office, turning to the painting behind her and tapping at the air near the frame. "They got this story all wrong in the end."

"History's written by the victors," he noted, wondering where she was going with this and what bearing it had on the situation at hand. "The state eventually got the oldest version removed from circulation. Too many religious overtones in the now non-religious USSR, I suppose. I'm not sure what shape the story will take now, in this new Russia. It's too early to even guess."

She studied the painting of the oldest version, the one of The Soldier And Death where Death backed away from the Soldier, scared of this mortal who had the guile to outwit her, to capture her, to command her. She would not draw near enough to him to take his life and risk falling for another plan. It was a grim sight, the air and background thick with the smoke, ashes and battles he had incited by inflicting an ageless, eternal life upon the population without thinking through capturing Death, for without her no one could age. Bodies on the ground blurred together to form the shadows of the lower part of the painting, where the Devil's arm was seen directing demons to shut the door to Hell tight. Up above, the clouds blurred together in a similar fashion to form a glimpse into a door to Heaven guarded by two angels wielding swords. And yet the only person the soldier had eyes for was Death, who he gazed at with horror and regret that was a bit late, all things considered.

"It's sad," she said at length, as Anatoly finished his sixth cup of coffee for the morning, "I really think Russia took the wrong moral from that whole incident."

He would've asked if it seriously had happened, but then he remembered _the spirit of the Earth_ was in his office and checked himself. For all he knew now, any number of myths could be true, and it would save a headache to just take her word for it. "My _praded_ is in love with it. The story of man's hubris on a grand scale – the kind of epic failure to check our arrogance that he feels defines Russian history. He likes the religious overtones he sees there. I've always been told it's about the inherent flaws within human egos." But she was shaking her head, so Anatoly asked, "What moral were we supposed to have gotten from it, then?"

"It's not about being arrogant or tampering in God's domain. That's never how I saw it, anyway," her voice dropped a little, features growing mournful. "He caught Death because he wanted to save the Czar. He wanted to save Russia and keep people from having to experience the loss of their loved ones so constantly. He thought it would stop wars from even happening if people knew there was no dying. They always leave that out, in both versions."

"Good intentions have consequences," he muttered darkly, not liking where this was going. "You're saying the people supporting the nuclear initiative are good people. You don't want me to do anything to send the metaphorical or very real creatures of the night that is the government police after them."

"I'm saying the people who attacked the Bolshoi are probably good people who think their cause is good as well." When he looked at her as if she'd lapsed into a language not spoken by humans, she explained. "The Rings can't be used by someone truly evil. There has to be a part of them that wants to help someone, that loves someone, that is even just the smallest bit selfless. I felt Gi's Ring this morning. These people aren't evil. There's a chance you could talk to them and reason this out, Anatoly, with the Planeteers backing you, with their experience. But…" she tapped at the air by the painting again, by the pile of bodies.

"Understood," he replied grimly, and when he blinked, she was gone.

* * *

Few people had access to the Yurasov family's personal phone, so when Linka was handed the phone by Evgeniy, she put it to her ear, ignored the pang of panic that coursed through her, and gave short, prompt answers. "Yes. Yes, it's me. No, he's- calm down, calm down. I can come get you. Where are you? Don't leave the block. I'll bring back up. I know. It's okay. Stay safe."

Wheeler voiced what the rest of them were thinking. "Who was that?"

"Shostakov," she stated simply, getting up, grabbing his hand and hauling him to his feet. "An old friend, who has information about alleged 'accidents' at a nuclear power plant. His apartment has been broken into; apparently some people are suddenly very interested in him after last night. We need to get him into the ZATO quickly. He could help us figure out a number of things."

Kwame and Gi exchanged looks, still pouring over the designs in Zinoviy Yurasov's journal. It was Gi who spoke up first. "Do you think all of us going into Moscow right now is a good idea?"

"Nyet. That's why I'm only taking Wheeler." She turned to him and added, "Come. I need you with me." She looped an arm through his and made her way towards the entryway of the mammoth house, leaving him blinking at the rapid turn of events. The blonde threw her dark blue coat on and wrapped a scarf around her neck in a uniquely Russian way that Wheeler tried, and failed, to imitate. She clucked her tongue, turning and adjusting it for him, smoothing his coat down as she did so. Alone in the entryway, the world suddenly seemed very small and intimate, and she let her hands linger for a moment.

"Babe…" Wheeler started, reaching up and grabbing her hands where they still rested on his chest. "I – you know what Anatoly said about Americans being mixed? My ma had Jewish heritage. Her maiden name was Cohen and everything."

She smiled sadly. "It isn't the same thing as being Jewish here." But she knew what he was trying to say, and slipped her hand into his. When she looked into his eyes, they were warm and sincere, seeking only to comfort. Her Yankee, her sweet Yankee with his vulnerable heart under that fiery and tough façade. Linka leaned up and kissed him on the cheek for his efforts. "Come, we need to hurry."

Being driven around would draw too much attention, so she successfully negotiated with Evgeniy for use of one of the family's cars. Given that Russians drove on the opposite side of the road than Americans, she took the driver's seat before Wheeler could protest, grateful to have to watch the road and not his face. Any second now, he was going to tell her all this was far too much to ask one man to deal with. She felt acutely the fear of the end of their relationship, already missed conversations late at night watching TV and bickering about the merits of American sitcoms, knew she would have difficulty cooking without him there to mispronounce and adore Russian food, would be unable to go anywhere with a beach without recalling the day they'd met. Linka had brought him into this maelstrom where the media, the people and the very culture around them were circling like vultures, leaving him unguarded and unprepared for multiple slaps to the face of information she'd been too afraid to tell him beforehand. She had lost one man to a prejudiced, vicious family. She hadn't been willing to risk Wheeler to the same thing.

He'd asked her if she was Russian when they first met and her blood had run cold, fear of her Serbian accent somehow being evident to even the ears of untrained Americans, and so she'd said Soviet because that was true without being a real answer. Would they be in this situation if she'd said Serbian? She doubted he would have known where the region was or what it was. Maybe he could have understood, as a lower-class kid from Brooklyn, what it was like to be assumed to be violent and uneducated everywhere she went, what feelings came from people asking if she had the money to pay for whatever she was holding in line at a store. They could have started on more equal footing, more honest from the start, spent less time dancing around their mutual attraction.

Linka drove in tense silence for several minutes before she blurted out, "I have ruined everything, haven't I? I have lied to you."

"Babe, things aren't – I mean yeah, you totally did lie, but it's okay. I think." He watched as she bit at her lower lip. Her pale skin caught the cool light of the cloudy morning sky and the bags under her eyes seemed bigger than they should have been. _She's been crying_ , he realized suddenly, feeling his stomach twist at the thought. "You're not the only one with exes. I ever tell you about the first girl I dated? 'Cause that was a doozy. I don't think you'd be dating me if you knew how badly that one went."

"…why?" she took the bait, reluctant as she was to hear about his exes at all, eyes still glued to the road. Moscow traffic wasn't terrible at this hour, but it was still thick enough to slow their progress.

"Her name was Ace, or, that's what we all called her. In a neighborhood with a bunch of kids, everybody gets nicknames. She had a little brother that these guys at our school picked on for being in a wheelchair. Ace never put up with that, so she got into a lot of fights. All the guys she hung with said if she hadn't had long hair we'd forget she was a girl, she was so good at it. That, and basketball, skateboarding, climbing buildings – man, we used to explore all these abandoned places when we were that age. I'm amazed we never got arrested. So one day before school, she's in a fight with six guys and I rush over to help." He looked over at Linka, whose lips quirked at the mental image. "We managed to get 'em roughed up before the teachers came. We totally told our friends we won and that there were eight of them. You know how New York is. Anyway, we're outside the principal's office, scuffed up, waiting to get our turn, and she turns to me and says we should date. That's what passed for romance in my world back then.

And we're in sixth grade so what does dating even mean, you know? It means I put my arm around her shoulders, we went to the movies together, we smuggled a dog into my apartment together. That kinda thing. Nothing to write novels about. Just us trying to make happiness out of all that loneliness. I cared about her, though. She was the first person I ever talked to about my dad's drinking, about my mom, about a lot of stuff. Ace was this strong person I could freak out in front of and it was always okay. She made it okay. But I was so busy having my own freak outs and dealing with my own stuff I never asked her about her life. Or if I did, it was the wrong questions. I never asked her why she was always out so late or why she was never home, and when her parents divorced I didn't get why she was angry about staying with her dad. He lived near me, and wasn't I enough? I thought I knew everything that was going on."

"Jason," Linka interrupted, or tried to, twisting her head to take in his profile against the greys of the buildings they passed by. He cut her off.

"Turned out Ace's dad hit her. Bruises the size of fists, scars from this time he'd thrown her through a glass table… and when she came over this one night, these cuts that seemed too big to be on someone so _tough_. He got drunk, went crazy on her, so she came to my place. Just for the night, she said, and then we'd call the cops in the morning when he was sleeping it off. I woke up and she'd taken off, filled up my old backpack with some food and stuff and left with a note saying she was going to miss me." He swallowed, taking in a deep breath. "They never found her. I don't even know if she's alive. And I'm probably never gonna know for sure, 'cause when everything came crashin' down I wasn't there for her. Not like I needed to be, anyway."

She exhaled, pursing her lips. Linka tried very hard not to think of what might have happened to a lone twelve year old in New York. They had worked with the homeless before in more than one country. The stories of those who managed to survive tended to be horrific at best. "It wasn't your fault. She made her own decision, Wheeler."

He shook his head. "It _was_. I should have talked to her, should've known what was going on, should have been somebody she could talk to about all that. After that I was all come-ons and no payoff. I didn't want to fail somebody else. I'm trash at this. And I know that. So whatever made you feel like you couldn't talk to me, I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry."

"But that's not it at all!" Linka half-shouted, unable to take the sight of Wheeler blinking back tears. "Don't you see, _I_ never _deserved_ you! Or Anatoly! Or anyone! All my life I've been so caught up in words like ' _serbskiy_ ' and ' _yevrey_ ' and ' _toskarebenok_ ' and I tried so, so hard to be better than any name they could throw at me, to not get into fights, to take everything in stride. I wanted to be perfect so no one could hurt me – but I couldn't be. I couldn't be any of the things I was trying to be without disappointing _someone_ in my family and when Anatoly proposed to me, I thought it was my ticket to finally being really Russian enough for the world. I was never Serbian enough or Jewish enough but to him I was _enough_ no matter what…"

"That's because you _are_ good enough, Linka," he quietly agreed, watching her shake her head with a growing sense of sadness. "Is that why you bailed on him? Because his family didn't get that?"

The blonde chuckled, a mirthless sound, still navigating the Moscow traffic with remarkable dexterity. "Nyet. I 'bailed' on him because the Yurasovs were right. I am not good enough for anyone. I am selfish, and a hothead, and I freeze people out, and I _always_ leave when things get too intense. I cannot deal with things, so I leave them behind. The people that love me, Jason, I leave. Sometimes I move north or east or to islands, but I always… I always leave. You deserve something permanent, my _ogonka_. Some _one_ permanent."

He placed his hand on her knee. She stiffened at the touch as if startled. "You haven't left me, babe, not once. You've never abandoned the Planeteers either, for anything. You've always been there when I needed you. And I don't want anyone else, so whatever I deserve, whatever you deserve, you're stuck with me, okay? No matter what."

She was silent for a long moment before curling her hand over his, driving one-handed. "Okay."

* * *

Petruso Shostakov opened the side door of Linka's car – technically Nazar's but on loan, probably – and threw himself into the backseat, sopping wet and borderline hysterical. Slamming the door shut, he yelled to Linka, "Go! Fast, out of here, now, they have a Ring – go!"

The car hadn't even come to a halt before he'd gotten into it, so making a U-turn and going back was easy enough. Chest heaving, he coughed up water and wiped fruitlessly at his bleeding nose before digging through his pockets for his spare glasses. Only then did he blink and realize the redhead in the car wasn't Anatoly. As far as introductions to superheroes went, this was likely not the single worst one, but it wasn't good, either. His suit was soaked, his chestnut brown hair a mess from having taken the impact of multiple blasts of water, and his Ukrainian had likely insured that even if Wheeler had known a word of Russian, he hadn't gotten the gist of that. Wondering if his shoulder was broken or just fractured, he pushed himself into a proper sitting position and winced.

"English, Petrushka, use English," Linka coaxed him gently, eyes darting to glance behind them in the rearview mirror. "What happened?"

"Someone with a Planeteer Ring just spent some time trying to drown the answers to the Pripyat meltdown's mysteries out of me. They asked about the demon core. I tried to tell them, that was my mother's work, that's still classified, I have no files. I'm just a student, I tell them, but they wouldn't hear it, wouldn't let up… They broke open the pipes. Everything got flooded. The one with the orange eyes picks something up from my mother's vault, one of the rocks, and gets sick. The blonde woman with him, the American, she forgets I exist for a few moments. Kneels over him, holds him close. I run. Here we are." Out of breath and energy, he eased himself back into the seat, holding his bad shoulder with his opposite hand. It was bleeding where a piece of metal from a burst pipe had gone through him like a gunshot. "I need a hospital. Now. Please."

While his old schoolmate gripped the steering wheel hard enough her knuckles went white, his own vision was dotted with black. The American redhead turned to look at him, concerned. "Stay with us. Talk to me, don't pass out." Basic First Aid there, but Petruso nodded weakly, appreciative of the attempt. "You said the woman who attacked you was blonde?"

" _Dah_. She was the one who could work the Ring. The other made me feel – I don't know. Sick and cold and hot and I saw things where there were none. Something is wrong with him, very wrong. But they work well together." He refrained from shrugging, in too much pain to do so. "I didn't get their names, I'm sorry, I…" His vision blurred, and Wheeler reached back to put a hand on his shoulder.

"It's okay. It's alright, buddy. You did great. Just hang in there. We've got you. They're not gonna mess with you now. Just stay awake, talk about anything. The weather, Linka, the break in, anything. We're gonna get you through this," he said with enough conviction to get an exasperated and fond smile out of Petruso.

He blinked behind his glasses. "My mother. My mother is in Sverdlovsk right now, but she's the one who knows what they want to know. She's worked in nuclear physics for thirty years. Classified projects, ones people think are urban legends. Get to her… keep her safe. I… I told them she's in St. Petersburg. Officially, she is."

Linka's voice was sharp with worry and alarm. "What is she doing out in Siberia, Petruso? The Siberian Wildlife Protection Act-"

"You will have to ask her," he muttered, shutting his eyes. "I don't know what she's doing out there. She wouldn't tell me. She was scared to. But it's important. It produced that thing in the vault that repelled the orange-eyed man. I was to keep it and several coded files just in case… in case she didn't return."

"The files?" the blonde asked, her militant tone rousing him from the tugging hands of sleep.

He sighed, blinking the world into blurry off-focus. "Nazar bought them out from my mother a while back. Bought all she would let him. Wasn't much, just that and what Yurasov relics we had… and a painting, some painting with Death in the Ural Mountains…"

A wave of tiredness hit him and his hand slipped from trying to hold his shoulder in place. For just a moment, he let the rhythm of the rolling car fill his ears.

Petruso was out cold before they'd made the next stop light.


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's Note:** I know this in inexcusably late and I apologize greatly for that. A lot of things have been going in real life for me, largely the kind of thing I don't even want to discuss with people in person, let alone on the internet. It's been a rough time. But I'm back, I promise. Also, I know this chapter is on the shorter side. That's mostly to get me back into the swing of writing. Besides, researching nuclear radiation and testing, as weird as I'm sure that makes my internet history look, results in my having to try to parse out things into the story in a way that hopefully sounds at least a little natural. So this chapter is an experiment and likely a failure on a number of levels, but at least it's a chapter? I don't know, I'm genuinely sorry and I'm doing my best, here. The next chapter will be better, I promise.

* * *

Ovdotya silently opened the door and slipped, ghost-silent, into Anatoly's office, mouth a line, eyes unreadable.

Having lived an entire life being mocked for her parent's religion, being berated by her parents for not following Rodnoverie, being assumed to be scientifically ignorant while always being the top in her class, she had developed a mask of ice that few people could make a dent in at this point. When the song 'Solitude' had come out the past winter, Anatoly had thought of her, but he was one of maybe four people alive (once five) who knew her well enough to associate her with a song involving _emotions_. Only those who knew her would be able to tell just how angry she was right now, standing in his office, gazing at him with unwavering silence. When angry, the dark-haired Russian went quiet, fuming under the surface, just waiting for an opening to deliver a simple, single line that would rip someone's heart out. Her demeanor was perfectly calm and collected, so Anatoly took a step back to protect himself instinctively.

"Petruso is alright," he reassured his former best friend as she grabbed a notebook off his desk. For a moment he remembered days where they had been like siblings, her total lack of consideration for his personal space and her irreverent attitude towards him despite his family's status. In a flash the past was gone, replaced with a very different present, one where she doubted him enough to have to double check his notes. "He's fine, they took him to a private hospital once he was stabilized. But he's not up to talking just yet, so-"

"You're using your connections," she finished for him. "Your father must be proud."

He sucked in a breath, wincing. That _hurt_ , and she knew it, but she picked through his notebook as if his writings were a paper she was checking for him, idly circling and marking things with a pen she'd brought, her thin fingers making light work of his information. What she really needed to do was talk to Linka. What he really, really wanted to prevent was that very thing. Looking at Ovdotya, it was clear none of the pain of losing her boyfriend had faded. She had always been a bit gruff and rough around the edges, yet standing now in the cold light of morning, she looked disjointed somehow, as if only routine and sheer willpower were keeping her going. Anatoly could see that she was hiding in her coat to try to conceal the weight she'd lost, trying to keep her hair put up in its' usual elaborate bun to conceal the waning anger that, when it wore itself out, would lead to a breakdown. For the moment she was fine, she was always fine if she had something to do. She was not fine if given a second alone with her thoughts or reason to confront the past.

Desperate times, however, had called for desperate measures. Besides which, he'd missed her, something he felt acutely without ever giving voice to it. Maybe he should have made that cleaner at some point before Bois died. Maybe he shouldn't have focused on his career, even though once Linka left it had felt like the only solid thing he had left to hold onto. Ovdotya looked up at him through thickly lashed eyes, and he wanted to embrace her he might have in their childhood, just grab onto her until things eased over. They looked at each other for a long, tense minute before returning their gazes to his desk. Their friendship wasn't what it once was and they were not who they had been. Time had not stopped for their tragedies. It never did, in Russia or anywhere else. The world was not interested in their pains or plans or happiness.

He tried for the distant formality that had always worked for him as a politician. "The Planeteers need the help of someone who knows something worth knowing about nuclear energy. You know I'm not a scientist."

"I'm an architect," she reminded him coldly. For a second, the look she shot him was so much like the way she used to, unamused and annoyed, that Anatoly braved placing a hand on her shoulder and squeezing it. She locked up.

"And you're an amazing one, Dotya," Anatoly told her, black eyes meeting her soft, cool grey ones. "You're also an amazing person in other fields, and right now we all need your expertise. We're lost, okay? _I'm_ lost. So just try, as best you can."

Ovdotya's shoulder slumped under his touch as she pinched the bridge of her nose. "I still hate you."

"I know." His smile was thin, sad. "I hate me, too."

* * *

Illarion was curled into a ball on the bed.

He could feel his heartbeat in his head, shuddering under the layers and layers of blankets Dr. Blight had laid over him, eyes too sensitive to open. His memories were blurry beyond being in the apartment, a burst of pain, and then the temporary blindness, the throbbing pain inside his ribcage, and then as it all faded to black there had been Barbara, disregarding her safety equipment to grab ahold of him. Belatedly, he realized she must have loaded him up, driven him here and started trying to tend to him on her own. If they'd gotten what they were after it was entirely because of her; he'd never had the breath knocked out of his chest like that. For a brief, confusing moment when he first woke up, he had thought he'd actually died, until he heard the faint sounds of Dr. Blight ranting at MAL in the other room.

Every muscle in his body seemed to be somehow stiff, his arms and legs deadweights he couldn't manage to lift. He had managed to look around for a few seconds before pain made him shut his eyes. For the first time in his life, he was scared, genuinely scared, of something he didn't understand. The rules that governed his city were harsh, but he understood how to be useful, productive, keep his head down and work hard so as to protect himself. The dangers of being too much of a burden to warrant living had never been something he'd really had to fear. He had no family to lose. He kept his expeditions to the surface to the inside of buildings for the most part, as much as he had looked out the dirty glass and been filled with longing. There was a reason they'd picked him to accompany Dr. Blight, one which Illarion wasn't lying to himself about. He was easy to keep in line. That had kept him safe for almost all of his life, until he left. Even then, he didn't really process the dangerous until the exact moment he felt the pain rip through his consciousness, sudden and violent.

"Basha?" he croaked out, hearing footsteps immediately afterward, followed by the door opening. "Are you okay?"

If he had enough energy to, he would have jumped at the cold washcloth she gently wiped his face with. "I'm fine. MAL is running diagnostics on the thing that did this to you. You're just… you're going to be out of commission for a few days."

He locked up, fearful. "I have to be productive," he said, quietly, anxiously, and sighed when she placed the washcloth over his eyes. "You know what they'll do to me if I fail."

"Nobody said anything about failing. We're adjusting the strategy." She ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it back. "I'm not letting anyone get to you. You're useful in ways that even I didn't anticipate. So if they're not satisfied with your performance back home, I'll be more than happy to take you off their hands."

Illarion felt something inside him that wasn't reassurance. It was uncertainty. He had always been assured of his place in his world, secure in how it worked and operated, living without questions about his future. The world held no possibilities beyond survival so he had learned to focus on work. He had never faced change, real change, before. The idea of Dr. Blight helping his people was exciting, leaving home had been thrilling, and everything had been an incredible journey until, now, it turned into something real, that reality being that nothing was set in stone anymore. His home's future, his own future, everything was up in the air, he was lost without sufficient knowledge or superiors to guide him through this, and the only thing he had left was a woman he probably shouldn't trust.

He forced his hand to move. She took it in hers. As much as he shouldn't trust her, he had to. Otherwise, he would be completely anchorless. Otherwise, he was alone in a world he had only recently even set foot in.

It wasn't a healthy relationship, but it was better than nothing.

* * *

There was never a day that would come when the absence of Boris didn't make being around Ovdotya an awkward thing.

They had been a group for a long time, gentle Boris and scathing Ovdotya, anti-nihilist Anatoly and optimistic realist Linka, each deeply passionate about things their classmates were not: cinema, architectural science, politics and the environment. They ran the gambit of Russia's array of backgrounds and made it work because, deep down, they were bleeding hearts with stars in their eyes even when everything they dreamed of seemed impossible. It had worked itself into a group dynamic, Ovdotya cutting down anyone who said anything unkind to her friends, Linka encouraging her friends and boyfriend, Anatoly using his family influence to do stupid things like get them into historical sites his friends would gush over ("Teenagers at the Ostankino Palace – what is the world coming to?" Linka's grandmother had remarked as Ovdotya gushed about the use of quoins for structural integrity inside the building) and Boris was the one who pulled their heads out of the clouds by relating the films he saw and his love of them to the people around him and to the future. He watched _Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears_ and asked them how many single mothers their own families passed judgment on without knowing the full story. He watched _Aelita_ and wondered when people had lost optimism in technology, if the ability to look at science and be filled with hope was truly gone. Anatoly was fairly sure the moment that Ovdotya had fallen in love with Boris came from when he dragged her out to see _The Night Before Christmas_ and he cried in the theater. He didn't mean to, didn't even realize he was doing it; he just felt things more intensely than any of them really understood.

They all understood now that it was too late. Someone that sensitive to poverty, to social issues, to people in general, should never have been placed in Washington D.C. and left isolated to stew over those thoughts. Friends had been only part of the appeal of Bliss for him. The bigger part of the appeal was being able to rip out the weight of the world he always seemed to carry. Anatoly blamed himself for not realizing the culture shock and change was going to lead him down the wrong path. Linka blamed herself for not having kept in touch better. Ovdotya blamed them both outwardly, but whatever was going on inside her head, she kept it to herself. She was the one who had meticulously recorded Russian movies and sent them to him, the one who he had left almost everything he owned to, the one who had once gotten up at three in the morning to take a series of trains to the Museum Of Cinematography with him without a word of complaint as a present to him before he left. The blame game was not something that was going to be settled without a fight. Anatoly was wholly willing to accept that despite being the oldest, he'd dropped the ball and it was entirely his fault. Unable to get a fight out of him, Ovdotya found new targets in the Planeteers, people who had diverted Linka's attention elsewhere.

Anatoly didn't blame the Planeteers at all. He was the one who was insufficient husband material, who had driven Linka away from Russia. That was his fault, not theirs. They were good people, even the one who was more or less his American replacement – and once the sting of that faded slightly, it made sense. He deserved to be replaced, because he had failed as a boyfriend and potential spouse. He hadn't been enough to make up for his family, hadn't been enough to keep the past from gnawing away at Linka's happiness, and while he wanted to hate Wheeler, truthfully he hated himself. He remembered when his mother had killed herself, the bloody bathroom, bathwater still flowing, standing in the doorway paralyzed before running for the phone. He hadn't heard himself scream or realized he was trying to pull her body from the water until his father stopped him, phone in one hand, clutching his wife's hand with the other. In that moment all Anatoly could do was follow his instructions to get his sister Klavdiya back to her bed as the six year old girl cried and screamed against him.

"Larissa from school says you should have called the hospital, that Mama would be here if you had. Larya's mama is a nurse so she knows these things," Klavdiya told him the day of the funeral, clutching the doll their mother had given to her for her last birthday to her chest. "I hate you," she told her brother as he felt something dark and heavy settle over him, the weight of being _not enough_ that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. "You killed Mama."

Everyone he loved, he let down, failed, lost, or drove away. That was why he had volunteered to go get Ovdotya. There was absolutely nothing she could say or do to him that was worse than what he thought of himself. That was why he had agreed to work with Gaia. Anatoly knew he was a failure as a person, but as a figurehead of the environmental movement, maybe he might be able to do something good for once. When he tried to help people, it never worked. When he tried to help movements and causes, he was surprisingly good at it.

Simply to save himself an argument between Linka and Ovdotya, he dove on the bullet of introducing the girl to the Planeteers. "Everyone, this is Ovdotya Konstantinovna Veretennikova. She double majored, as much as the Russian system allows for that, in structural engineering and metallurgy, and before you ask why that's relevant, that means she's qualified to actually engage in an investigation as to what was and wasn't an accident." He turned to her, and pointed to Kwame, Gi, Ma-Ti and Wheeler in turn. "That's Kwame Sabisi, the sole voice of reason, Ji-ae Seong, who goes by Gi because the world is ignorant of Asian cultures and educating people is damn near impossible, Ma-Ti, who is sort of like a non-white version of Gerda from the animated version of _The Ice Queen_ , and Wheeler, the American who breaks most of the stereotypes of New Yorkers we learned from movies. Except the accent," he amended quickly. "That one has never been truer."

"Hey," Wheeler protested, only to have Gi snicker and Linka shush him.

Ovdotya looked over them with mild disdain, before her eyes alighted on Linka and her expression turned stony. "Linya."

"Dotya."

Anatoly looked between them, ready to intervene, only for Ovdotya's attention to get turned to the notebook Linka had scrawled some of the things Petruso had said on it. "Why is the term 'demon core' on here? As it applies to nuclear matters it's classified. If I weren't potentially designing buildings for the nuclear initiative, I wouldn't have access to it. He shouldn't know about it. He's not that deep into his classes."

"He said that the people who attacked him asked him about it," Kwame put in thoughtfully as the dark-haired Russian picked up the notebook, raising her eyebrows at points. "They seem to be the same people behind the attack on the Bolshoi who claimed that the nuclear disasters were not accidents."

Ovdotya hummed, tilting her head, flipping to a new page and grabbing a pen. "His mother might know about it. She's a very high-level nuclear physicist. Petruso, though, that's a dead-end. They must not have known she was out of the area." She started scribbling, quick cursive Cyrillic in patches and corners, making connecting lines, holding up a hand to shush Linka when she started to ask what the other girl was doing. After a long minute and a half of silence, she made connecting lines, marked them with varying shapes, and flipped the notebook around for all of them to see.

Wheeler squinted at it. His Russian was limited mostly to the printed alphabet, because it was what was used in most of the books he'd found on teaching himself Russian. Mostly, the cursive was impenetrable to him. What he did see, however, was that all points on the page, the places nuclear disasters had happened and people's names (which he could distinguish by the endings of names, mostly) led back to two places and two dates.

"This is everything they have mentioned. The lines are connections to each other, era and type marked by the same system they teach most Russian kids in primary school when we're first learning about historical intersectionality. One of the exercises they used to give us was to omit something extremely critical but not obvious and see if we could figure out what it was and place it in the middle." She tapped the middle. "The demon core is an American reference. It doesn't go in the center, though, because it ties into the demon core Petruso's mother is working on stabilizing – don't ask how I know that, I'm not supposed to and I got it from a source who could get executed for it. But with it, we can ask, 'what other things did both countries permit that is dangerous, unethical and directed related to all aspects of nuclear energy'? Mostly, our countries are very proud of most of their nuclear accomplishments. Except for the information leaks in the 80's in the United States and last year, here; we have a hard time justifying human experimentation to the populous. So," she shrugged. "We need to consider the involvement of that in the motivating factors of these people. It could be heavily informing their position."

"What's 'Totskoye' mean?" Wheeler asked, having figured out the word. The other place name was San Francisco. His stomach twisted at the idea of what the answer might be.

"It's where an 'accidental' detonation of a nuclear bomb took place. It gave the Soviet government forty five thousand radiation victims to study and try experimental healing techniques on. The papers told us it was an accident for over forty years. A terrible misfiring, complete with six hundred pages of publically available reports on the failures of every mechanism that led to it, including details ripped from personal journals of people from the affected area for extra realism."

Gi put a hand over her mouth and swayed, looking ill. Ma-Ti turned, opened a window and tried to breathe in and out steadily.

"So," Linka said in a small voice, "If the other accidents were not in fact accidental, there is precedent for it. This may have gone under the radar before as part of the hatred of the old regime, but once the papers get ahold of this information, they'll think it's possible."

"It _is_ possible. I'm a structural engineer. I know you don't want to hear it, but these people may not be lying. And if they aren't, then they may be victims of involuntary human experimentation. That's a violation of their human rights. That's why they want to push the initiative forward," Ovdotya explained coldly, sounding detached. "Evidence of how structurally impossible the failures are would entitle them to government reparation and medical treatment, along with UN crisis funding."

Anatoly stared, brow furrowed. "What are you saying, Ovdotya?"

"Have you considered you may be fighting the good guys?"


	8. Chapter 8

**Author's Note:** I did a lot of weird things for this chapter. I looked up what language and ethnicity Ma-Ti is most likely to be. I translated a Russian poem. I did Wheeler's family tree in MS Paint. I listened to the song V'birat' Chudo (Choose A Miracle) by Nyusha enough times I think I'll always associate it with this fic. I listened to Joel McKerrow's performance poetry piece Welcome Home repeatedly until I now hear the opening notes and think of Ma-Ti's Ring. I looked up some Ukrainian. I have to have a fascinating search history to my internet provider.

But long and convoluted as it might be, this chapter reignited my love for this fanfic, for the Planeteers in all their well-intentioned glory and all the rough spots they probably find themselves in, in the themes this fic was based on addressing, and so yes, updates are definitely not going to have giant gaps between them again. Not anymore.

* * *

Given the dining room had the best tables, it had been remade into something of a war room for planning, complete with a map of Russia – and only Russia – that stretched across a third of the wall and had immense detailing on it they had already put some markers on.

Linka and Ovdotya took all of three minutes to get into an argument with each other, which was actually an impressive length of peacetime given the current state of things. Linka had never found an argument she didn't find worth having, which both Wheeler and Anatoly found charming, though Wheeler was having the revelation that her personality was at least somewhat informed by a lifetime of having to shout to be heard over everyone's preconceptions of each other. Ovdotya had never been in a situation she couldn't blame someone else for, even if it took considerable mental gymnastics to do so. A long time ago, she'd decided she wasn't going to take the fall for anyone and she wasn't going to forgive anyone who didn't deserve it.

"You can't go to Sverdlovsk," Ovdotya told Linka with that perfectly measured tone she used to dismiss people. "I know running away is the better part of valor to _you_ , but the Planeteers can't be seen going anywhere without official function and in official capacity."

It was obvious bait, but a low enough blow Linka rose to it. "Not all of us are made for lives hiding in crowds at universities while the world needs us."

Ovdotya didn't even look away from the map. "And you've been doing such a great job of helping Yugoslavia in its' hour of need."

Wheeler grabbed Linka's hand as her fingers curled into a fist. "Does somebody wanna tell me why Yugoslavia keeps coming up? 'Cause Linka's never been there and her family's in Russia and, like, I get it, Serbia is in Yugoslavia, but I'm not seeing why that makes her Sworn Defender Of Yugoslavia or whatever. By that logic Gi has to go smooth over Japan and South Korea's issues and I gotta go fix… British-Irish relations, Ireland, Denmark, go check on the Netherlands and then go poke at like, three Inuit tribes in Canada."

"I – wait, Inuit?" his girlfriend squinted at his pasty white skin, as did most of the room as he blushed, looking sheepish. "How far back in your lineage is _that_ , Yankee?"

"Six generations on my Pop's side. Great-great-way-too-many-greats-Grandma Iqsra." He never tried for the woman's full name, because 'Iqsrabutilik Qaunaqtaun' as processed through a Brooklyn accent was no longer a word but a series of sounds. "Anyway, my point stands. We're just teenagers, we're not miracle workers. We can't stop wars and we can't be responsible for every group we're related to. We're not presidents or prime ministers, Dottie."

Ovdotya rarely did a double take, yet she shot him a look that was pure confusion at the nickname. "…right. Look, _krasniko_ , the point here is that your presence has political weight to it in all those countries and more. A trip to Sverdlovsk is going to look like you're giving serious weight to the possibility of these people being right, which would be seen as the Planeteers having an uncertain or pro-Nuclear Initiative stance when you are supposed to have a de facto anti-Initiative stance. Regardless of how much information we could dig up there, it would cost more to your cause than you'd gain. Petruso's mother could also be put in danger by these people if you did. They have no reason to go there and go after her unless you do."

"So a few of us could go," Linka shot back, leaning against Wheeler for support while Gi and Anatoly wrote in multiple notebooks trying to decode useful information out of the old journal that still served as their only true insight into nuclear research that wasn't censored in any way. "My grandmother lives out that way, and she wants to meet Wheeler. We could make it look like a personal trip."

"Except during your last personal trip, you left the country," Anatoly put in, still scribbling away at decoding his grandfather's writing. "The media will spin it all the wrong ways, because that's the tune of the hour. Dotya, can you find 'Vorkuta' on the map, somewhere in Komi? There's a bunch of references to some kind of radiation-stabilizing ore sent there for processing. It's the only named location for refining any mineral in here so far."

They were using tiny neon stickers swiped from his sister's room due to a lack of pushpins to mark cities and highlighters for the vaguer areas. Vorkuta took a minute to find, and was situated within the Arctic Circle. It was so far from the area where Anatoly's grandfather had been working that Wheeler was pretty sure he could fit half a Texas inbetween the two. Kwame had taken to the Russian system of connecting events like a fish to water, mind always sharper than he let on – he was quiet and humble, so it was easy to forget how intensely intelligent he was – and he scrawled out Vorkuta onto the list of locations with a small note. He used to help a neighboring farmer, a man whose dyslexia made literacy nearly impossible for him, with much more complex paperwork than this. In a way, he was glad to have the part of this work that dealt in facts and not in complicated interpersonal conflicts. This was supposed to be a simple task of getting in, convincing the right people to side against the Initiative, and getting out. How it had turned into this mess was beyond him.

Ma-Ti had the less than important sounding but actually vital job of watching the news to see if anything relevant to their interests came up. Given his Ring let him understand all languages, he was uniquely suited to the task, something that Anatoly had made sound like high praise. He wasn't really happy about being sidelined, though, and wished he were older so he might be useful in more areas. His displeasure made him the sole recipient of Ovdotya's rare sympathy: "A fish will think himself stupid if he mourns that he cannot fly like the birds. But both are needed in the islands of north, so hush," she'd said, with finality. His age kept him from most of her wrath, even over Boris' death. Ma-Ti was merely a child himself, too young to be held accountable for events wildly out of his control and understanding.

"You're all missing the point," Ovdotya muttered, sounding drained suddenly. She leaned against the table with her free hand, putting her weight on it. "Forty five thousand people plus whoever we don't know was experimented on, finally pushed to the point they drag in an ecovillain to try, just to _try_ , to have a chance at getting justice. And nobody on Team Multicultural can be bothered to give a damn. You're all planning on taking down the Initiative, but what about all the dead, their children and grandchildren, the radiation poisoned people and land and ruined lives? It's like Linka and Yugoslavia. Related people, just not closely related enough to care about their lives, not closely related enough to be human, not people who 'count'. Whether these people are right or not, they deserve some kind of compensation, and no one cares. And people call me uncaring?" She abruptly turned to leave the room in noiseless strides, a thin wisp of a woman. "I'm going on a walk. I expect you to have figured out a solution to the actual moral question when I get back."

Like a whirlwind of motion, she was gone before anyone could stop her, leaving the question they hadn't wanted to address in her wake.

Linka was right, though. Bailing was _tremendously_ satisfying.

* * *

 _Excerpt from the journal of Zinoviy Yurasov, June 17, 1953_

 _The American defector arrived today from Vorkuta as we were installing the new coolant system. She is from some place in the American South, one of those places where one's accent does unique things to Russian and English alike. She wasn't allowed anywhere near any of the new installations, but rather was assigned to my supervision. Dark skinned and plainly dressed, she seemed relieved when I did not interrogate her. We spoke instead of work, of the eternal inability of metal workers to get deliveries right here or in the States, of our surprising mutual love of the 1927 German film Metropolis. Her ideas on counteracting radioactivity are very promising, and I found her to be good company that I do not foresee troubles working with in the future._

 _Though she hasn't said it, I do not think I am what she expected of Russians. Over dinner, for our sketches and equations blew right through lunch, I told her of my family back in Moscow, amused her with tales of my children and their troublemaker ways, and regaled her with the tale of the time I used high-science terms to convince a security guard domovoi were real and watching him. She has a laugh like bells, light and echoing, her hands nearly as dark as the teak wood of the dining hall tables. When we were debating going back to work and working through the night, she mentioned a mother who had always been telling her to go to sleep, a childhood spent on a farm rushing through chores to get to reading science textbooks she stole from her brother, who apparently did not give her future in the field of physics much credit. I pointed out no countries were clamoring for his attention and earned what I think might have been a Southern American English term of endearment from her. We ultimately decided to resume work tomorrow, which of course Dr. Aslanov had to mock me for._

' _Congratulations, Gospozha Davis,' he said with overly feigned sincerity, 'You've already worked a miracle by getting Yurasov to get to bed before the sun rises. Will you be turning water into wine next?' Half the dining hall laughed, and several people clapped after Aslanov got them started, damn him and his childish tendencies. If we had any veneer of professionalism left in her eyes, we lost it in that moment._

 _Some still think she is a spy pulling off the most elaborate of schemes, but I don't give that any credit. Here, she noted as we rode in a cab back to our respective lodgings, a black woman can ride in a cab beside a white man without it being dangerous. I think that's the real reason she defected – because there is something deeply wrong with the American people, that they would ignore a genius for the amount of melanin in her skin. I wish Russia did not do the same with some of our own people. But things, I know, will change, and I told her as much. In any case, if the Americans wanted to sabotage the facility, they should have tried back before we did an overall of all the cooling systems. We are perfectly equipped now to deal with the physical problems presented by nuclear energy._

 _We are not yet equipped to deal with the mistrust people have of each other, but with me, at least, Gospozha Rosaline Davis may count herself as an equal. Perhaps that can be enough to make this transition easier for her. I hope so. More than that, I hope that one day people will not defect based on their heritage. My father always said to judge people on their character, which is why I put up with Aslanov's childishness and Dolmatova's anxious nature. Their intentions are good and their integrity strong. This is not some Tolstoy play – one would think these days, in this era, these things would count for something._

 _I have to quit writing now. I promised her and my wife both I would endeavor to sleep at least once every twenty four hours, and I fear for myself greatly should two women turn their wrath on me at once._

* * *

Boris would have helped those people.

Ovdotya did not so much as twitch, face a perfect mask of indifference. Boris, she knew, was not coming back. Boris was not the one chosen as a Planeteer, not the one called to be a hero, because heroes had to make executive decisions like who counted as a person and who did not. A lack of reparations for the people who had attacked the Planeteers would cause more civil unrest, more protests, muddy the waters of any initiative going forward. It was politically savvy to ignore the suffering of whoever these people were, however many there were. Finding them was only vital because of that Ring. Jewelry versus human lives, and of course, the jewelry won, because this was the way of the world, the way of not merely Russia but of any country or person given a smidgen of power.

She was immune to that because she had no real power. She might be able to pitch in on this one thing, at most. Past that, she was easy to leave, easy to drop and forget when things got rough. After all, between Linka becoming a Planeteer and Boris dying, neither of her friends had reached out for her. Neither of them had checked in on her, her first semester at the university driving it home that there was only one person alive who cared. Now that he was gone, he seemed to have taken all the compassion and warmth in the world along with him.

Sometimes she thought about just walking out into Moscow traffic and getting it over with. Twenty people died in Moscow every day from traffic accidents. One more wouldn't surprise anyone. She walked through the lightly falling, wet snow that disintegrated the second it hit the ground and cursed the ZATO for having far less traffic than Moscow proper always did. She played with the end of the scarf Boris had given her before he left, a near-perfect recreation of the one the female lead wore in _The Stone Flower_ , with the addition of his own crude stitching of an owl atop a clock on one end. It was really quite poorly done. She loved it immensely, with the sorrow now of knowing she would never again have him reach over to try to fix it around her neck, tsking at her for being able to do elaborate hairstyles and yet not get a scarf right. "I have you for scarves," she had always said, then she had heaved long suffering sighs and fixed his hat.

The ZATO had a park, and that was where Ma-Ti found her, staring at nothing, contemplating if it was worth the effort to even help the Planeteers, if it wouldn't be better to leave, go get something to eat from the Koryo-saram diner and rewatch that mini-series about the time traveling girl on TV tonight. Ovdotya was a great fan of fiction, particularly comedies. In fiction, people cared about each other, deaths had meaning, endings made sense, and if she turned the lights down low enough, if the air was warm enough, for a second she could pretend Boris was there talking about what was onscreen and how it applied to them. He had wanted to help people. Linka wanted to help the world. There was a difference, there. People's best interests and the planet's didn't always align, and when they didn't people had to pick a side. Linka had picked hers a long time ago.

Ovdotya had picked hers on the basis that somewhere out there in the sea of the human race, there might be even one person like Boris, good and kind, goofy, naïve, worth saving. Then time wore on without giving her any reason to believe in another such person. She looked at Ma-Ti, unimpressed when he held out an umbrella to her.

"You're shivering," he said, getting a shrug for his trouble. Undeterred, he sat beside her and held the umbrella over both of them, like an annoying little brother, but his eyes were much older than the body they were in. "Anatoly and Linka are worried about you."

She snorted, folding her hands in her lap and looking out at the trees, the fountain, the tiny chunk of green in a mass of concrete and sprawling grays.

Ma-Ti frowned at her reaction, or lack thereof. "You know, I know how you are feeling." Ovdotya bit the inside of her cheek, suppressing any retort. He had no idea what it was like to not be able to walk by a movie theater without wanting to cry, had no idea how hard she was trying to stay angry so she wouldn't breakdown and be too sad to keep going. "I know you want to help people, even bad people, even people who have lashed out at us. I know what it's like to see good in people that others do not think is there. Sometimes, big movements leave people behind. In my country, the movement to industrialize made life very hard for many of my people, but because it helped many more people than it hurt, few people protested. You want to keep that from happening here. I do, too. But a closed heart can't reach out to others. Right now you cannot even work with Linka in the room."

" _Ya ne chuvstvuyu syerdshye_ ," she murmured, causing him to squint at her. Ovdotya raised an eyebrow, fractionally. "I thought that Ring translated spoken language?"

"Not poetry, or at least, not very well," the Brazilian explained, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. Maybe, he thought, he should try being a little less direct about the issues the Russians were having. "What is that from, anyway? All the Russian I know is what's on TV, you see."

"It's an old poem by Artyem Korrolov. They made it into a song, recently. I like Korrolov's works. I also like it when people don't try to change the topic on me."

He sucked at his lower lip. "I am only trying to help."

His sincerity earned him a sigh and an explanation. "The poem goes like this: 'I do not feel my heart, I do not feel my hand. I myself decided, silence is my friend. I myself shut the door; I am pleased with myself. Why is it so hard, why is it so painful? I do not feel my heart, I do not feel my hand.' It's very melodramatic and typically Russian." She tried to downplay the meaning, but her eyes betrayed her for a moment, a flicker of something pained passing over her eyes, and she pressed her lips into a tight line to squash the feeling down.

"That sounds like a very lonely way to live," Ma-Ti said softly, taking her now icy hand in his. His age and cultural differences played some part in his disregard for Russian ideas of personal space but mostly, he cared too much not to reach out to people who needed it. "That sounds like the man who wrote it was scared, and alone, and hurt. I feel very sorry for him."

"Yeah," she agreed softly. Boris, she thought with a pang, would have liked Ma-Ti. But then, he never met Ma-Ti as himself, just glimpsed him through the haze of American drugs.

He turned a little on the bench to look at her. "Is that how you've been feeling all this time since Boris died?"

"…no. I do not feel my heart. Not enough to feel anything other than being tired, some days – you may not understand. I don't get it, myself. I just do what I can to keep people away from me. People are selfish, myself included, and it's really simpler to do what has to be done to get through the day and leave it at that. Things like my attack on conscience back there don't actually make a difference in the end." She made a gesture with one arm to the ZATO in general. "If people really cared about others, places like this wouldn't exist.

Ma-Ti frowned at her, so she shrugged in response. After a moment, he withdrew his hand to start to take his Ring off. She watched him with dull, hopeless eyes, then furrowed her brow when he slipped it onto her own right hand's ring finger. For one, a ring that fit him shouldn't fit any random person he put it on, for another, she was fairly sure this was against some kind of Planeteer rule, and most of all, if there was ever a person who didn't deserve or want the Heart Ring, it was the woman who took up the poem Solitude as her only way of explaining her worldview. Furthermore, they needed the thing on his hand to translate, because while Ovdotya was fluent in multiple languages – she'd taken German in secondary school in addition to English – she realized belatedly she didn't know what Ma-Ti spoke. Brazilian Portuguese, probably, a language whose sole words she knew were 'woman', 'milk', and 'catapult' owing to a very interesting conversation with an international student at the university a month ago. She stared at the younger boy as he grinned at her as if putting his Ring on her hand made any sense, then moved to raise her arm to the sky.

"Ro-ñe'ẽ," he said, gesturing to his mouth, getting an exasperated huff out of her. Apparently, the translation abilities didn't pass onto anybody who happened to nab it. She supposed there was a reason for that, but that was a question for later. He pressed his free hand over his heart. "Ko'se. Ndepota."

With great trepidation and mild confusion, she looked at the Ring, then at the vast, overcast sky they were pointing it at. "Serdtse!" she proclaimed, aiming for the general enthusiasm the Planeteers usually used when they were doing this.

The pink light shot up to the sky, and all of a sudden, her consciousness exploded, expanded, and the world was inside her head.

There was an elderly couple a block over giving up their spot in the ZATO to their youngest daughter and her husband and their unborn child. There were children watching the TV afraid of the future being reassured by loving parents everything would be alright even as they didn't know. There were politicians afraid the wrong moves would hurt all the people they represented, there was a representative from Chukotka sobbing into his hands because he felt guilty for being here while his brother was dying of leukemia in a hospital across the country, there was a little Ukrainian girl looking into her fridge to plan out what she could give to the homeless man who begged on the sidewalk by her school because she remembered her grandfather telling her of the famine of 21' and 22' and she never wanted anyone to be that sad again.

Ovdotya glimpsed the strain of a young dyslexic boy's mind as he was helped with his homework by the housekeeper who had never been able to have a son of her own, the joy and trepidation in the mind of a man as his son informed him he'd been chosen to be an ambassador to the United States and how fear and pride collided as they embraced, the fervor with which a young journalist was writing a piece about how the war in Yugoslavia was not a sign Russia could not survive but a clarion call to the world to take up tolerance and acceptance as the new norm, the endless regrets and tears of a grandfather reading a condolence letter regarding the death of his grandson who gave his life in service of Doctors Without Borders, the certainty in the voice of a little boy as he told his best friend that just because she was albino didn't mean she wasn't pretty and he'd always tell off those mean older boys, the wonder in the eyes of a woman who had been denied access into the astrophysics program she wanted when she was young because of her gender who was reading a translated NASA report and finding fulfillment in it, the fierce indignation of a man whose eyes were lightning flares as he glared at two young men and helped an old woman across the street without being asked. In one house a death was mourned, in another a birth was celebrated, in one a five year old was struggling to read a book of fairy tales to her bedridden grandmother, in another a six year old boy was practicing for the Olympics even though his parents had told him he had no chance and he would never be good enough, in one a marriage was being planned and in another, discussions of divorce quietly ripped two people apart, and all, all these people, they all had fears and hopes and love and hate and quirks and doubt and regret and joy and contentment wrapped up in their histories shifting sometimes by the second, like the whirling of the Northern Lights, and there, _there_ was her own heart, just as real, everyone was as real and human as anyone else, as much a person, and Ovdotya lowered her arm with tears in her eyes.

Without a word, she turned and pulled Ma-Ti into a tight embrace. And they were not a rich Franco-Russian and a poor Guarani Brazilian, they were not a nearly grown woman in expensive clothes with perfectly done hair and a boy who wore whatever fit and rarely even brushed his hair, not an architect and a superhero, just two people, in a sea of endless people who all were as wonderful a people, a species, as could be imagined. All dividing labels fell away, and there was nothing but that which united them.

He slipped his Ring back on, looking at her with his too-wise, too-emotional eyes. All that she experienced, he had experienced with the Ring a hundred times over, all over the world. "We decided we are going to help these people. I promise. We just need your help. There are many things we do not know, and if we cannot contact them or prove them right or wrong, we cannot help them. So please, come back. Okay?"

"Okay." She nodded; for the first time since Boris died, she understood why the world was worth saving. "Okay," she repeated, getting up, less tired, less alone, knowing this was what Boris would have wanted.. "Let's get to work."

* * *

Linka sank down onto the couch, staring at the television.

"Babe?" Wheeler queried, and she tugged him down to sit beside her. His eyes landed on the television, trying to get through the images and symbols and photographs that meant nothing to an American mind not yet versed in Russian politics. For a moment, he tried to come up with some kind of question. The channel was a local Ukrainian station, a language he didn't understand. His Russian had gotten much better with his girlfriend's help, but this was too foreign to grasp.

Then some pictures of Linka's father were shown, along with the crest he remembered Zlatan wearing, the four golden C's – S's in the English alphabet – on a red background. There were pictures of newspaper headlines in Russian. He wracked his mind to put together the word 'ubiytsa' from it, because it was one of the shorter words. When he did, he wrapped an arm around Linka, holding onto her tightly. He called for Anatoly to get in here, but he remained rooted in the living room, on the couch, eyes never off Linka's face, which had completely drained of color. The words 'Srpski' and 'Srpkiya' kept repeating from the television, from the newscaster, unrelenting, breaking over Linka like waves over a drowning woman. Her breathing became ragged as her hands began to shake.

"Nyet," she murmured, so softly Wheeler barely caught it. "It's just a lie. The papers always lie. _Bozhe moye_ , can they not leave it be?" She sounded on the verge of tears, and whatever Anatoly said when he entered the room, Wheeler was willing to bet it was a swearword.

 _Ubiytsa_ , the newspaper onscreen read.

 _Murderer._


	9. Chapter 9

**Author's Note:** I cannot apologize enough for the continual delays and schedule slips that compose my life. I am a terrible writer and I am sorry.

* * *

Jevrem took the hairbrush from his wife's tired hands and told her to go to bed already; she frowned at him, but kissed him as Linka watched the tiny TV in their tinier apartment.

The TV was a gift from a friend, sort of. Where it came from wasn't as important as the fact that it was making his children happy and helped them fit in at their school. Moscow was a huge step up from the mining town they'd lived in; even their poorest of neighbors was wealthier than their richest ones back there. He knew he could help Ilinka and Mihailjo study any time, but he could not bring them up to speed on Russian pop culture or be there when their playmates asked them if they were keeping up with the latest cartoons and shows. He worked the hairbrush into the sturdy knots in his daughter's hair as they both watched a rerun of _Go There, Don't Know Where!_ Jevrem had to smile at both the movie and his child. Distantly, he remembered seeing that movie when he was young, wide-eyed and idealistic, a new immigrant to Russia, seeking out a better life.

"Next time," he told his daughter, "Put your hair up when you beat up a boy."

She giggled, bringing sunshine into the dark evening. Her face was much like his, with a small nose and bright green eyes, but her hair was her mother's, and he marveled sometimes he'd had a part in creating someone so beautiful. "You're supposed to tell me not to beat up boys, Otac."

On instinct, he glanced around them. He sighed silently when he realized his wife wasn't listening. They'd been trying to get the children to stop calling him that here. A proper Russian said Papa, not Otac. A proper Russian did a lot of things his children didn't do, and he hated pushing them to be people they weren't. Jevrem knew it was confusing to them that the world couldn't accept even the small Serbian things like that when their teachers, the news and all of Russia drilled into them that prejudice was the problem of lesser countries like the United States. Mihaljo was doing better than his sister at adapting to Moscow. He had eagerly abandoned his name for Mikhail, bleached the dark ink-brown out of his hair when one classmate of his had said they'd seen a Serb who looked like him at the grocery store. His son listened to Russian music, poked his head into a Russian Orthodox church, swore in Russian, talked up how Azeri people coming over the border were ruining Russia, so long as he didn't know his father was in earshot.

Jevrem hadn't said anything to him the day he heard his son talking like that on the phone. He and his son had just stared at each other for a long moment before Jevrem felt something between them break and he turned away, telling himself it was best this way. Really, it was – they'd have better futures, both of them, if they could learn to be like that. He hadn't called his son Mijo or _lepotane moj_ in months. They'd lived here for nearly four years. This was inevitable. He told himself that often, when he couldn't sleep despite being dead tired and overworked, as he stared up at the ceiling. It shouldn't hurt; words were only words, after all. But Linka filled his heart up by insisting on Linka as a nickname, refusing to change her name, calling him _sreco moja_ and curling up with him most evenings when she wasn't out with friends. Of course she called him Otac. No one made his daughter do a damn thing she didn't want to.

" _Vihora moja_ , you know how your mother feels about you saying that. So I'll make you a deal," he said quickly as she opened her mouth to object, "I'll cover for you the next time you get into a fight, so long as it was for a good reason, if you can be good for your mother, alright?"

She exhaled the most dramatic sigh he'd ever heard outside of a sitcom. Jevrem chuckled, working the knots out of her hair as she pondered laboriously over this. He would never get tired of his dramatic child and her expressiveness. She got a lot of that from his mother, who he wished she could have met. They would have gotten along like a lit match and gasoline. "Fine," she relented. "But I still think Ilinka is a prettier name than Malinka."

He thought about pointing out they weren't radically different names, then decided Linka probably would say he was missing the point. Instead, he tried to keep the mood light. "You know, I almost named you Vesna."

"Otac!" she half-shrieked, turning to look at him with horror. "Like the girl on that American cartoon?!"

" _Scooby-Doo_ hadn't had a Russian release back then," he defended himself, savoring the wide eyes and total shock on her perfect features. "Besides, I think her name was something different in the American original anyway. What's wrong with Vesna?"

Linka shook her head helplessly, giving up her father as a lost cause. He was nice, but he would never be cool. It just came with being a parent, probably. As he braided her hair for the evening, she mulled over a different question: "What would you have named me if I was a boy?"

"Neven, maybe. Or Nikola, though you would've changed it to Nikolai once we moved," he replied, and she frowned, shaking her head. "What?"

" _I_ wouldn't change it," she muttered angrily. "Mijo made you sad, when he did so. I would rather be made fun of by strangers than make you or Mama feel bad."

Jevrem swallowed back a lump in his throat, not wanting to get emotional when he knew he had to go work his so-called 'second job' tonight. "If… if when you're older, that changes, that's alright, Linka. You'll always be my _malo vihora_ , no matter what you do, or say, or call yourself. Your brother is still my _knez_ , too. Okay?"

"Okay. But I won't change my name."

With a smile, he finished fixing her hair, planted a kiss to the top of his indomitable-spirited daughter's head and shooed her off to bed. As he put his winter clothes on in the dark and carefully slipped his handgun into the inside pocket he'd sewed into the coat, he heard her sneak back into the living room to turn the TV on the lowest volume possible, a volume that necessitated she sit all of four inches away from the screen just to hear it. He stood in the doorway for a moment watching her small form silhouetted against the bright screen, saw her fists clench through a particularly scary moment in the movie as she refused to look away even though she clearly wanted to. She was so kind, so good, he marveled that he had anything to do with her upbringing. Sometimes, he thought about leaving the work he did, for the sake of his conscience, for the sake of his own sanity. Then he thought of his children and steeled himself for another round. Seeing his daughter like this, safe and sound, enjoying her childhood and all its' little luxuries he'd never had growing up, he knew he could no more quit crime than quit breathing. Everything was worth it for moments like this, and everything always would be.

He slipped out of the apartment silent as a shadow, the orchestral swell of the TV's music still in his head as he entered the dangerous quiet of the Moscow night.

* * *

For several moments, Linka was silent, watching the TV blather on in a language she really had only ever gotten mediocre grades in. The words barely registered with her other than the one that counted.

Murderer, the TV said. Murderer, as if it were that simple, that cut and dry, as if no further explanation need be given. As if these people turning her father into a ratings' surge could ever comprehend what his life had been like, all the time he had spent working, all the insults he'd had to take in stride, the threats he had to force himself not to respond to, the constant marathon of off-color jokes he'd pretended not to find offensive for years just to get by. They had no idea what it was like to have every action interpreted as dangerous or angry, to have to watch everything said and done in order to make it through the day. Linka's father had been in a lot of fights in his life. She knew that from the scars he bore than he kept concealed under layers of clothing, all of them frightening, some of them still an angry red, others pale and faded. She had only walked in on him changing once. After that he kept the bedroom door locked to a paranoid degree. Linka knew he wanted her to think the world was a good place and that he had wanted her to fit in and live a happy life unburdened by the weight of her heritage.

She was tired of trying to fit in and tired of the good life and that was half of why she'd left Anatoly, but to be honest with herself, if she'd really been through with lying she would have told Wheeler she wasn't really Russian the second they met and he told her he loved her accent. After years of trying to hush up her family history, she had thought she could start anew with the Planeteers, just leave her entire prior life behind and remake herself.

The past was not a thing that could be outrun. She saw that now. Getting to her feet, she accepted Wheeler's hand when he reached for hers and tugged him towards the table, dimly aware of Anatoly turning off the TV with the remote, the word murderer still repeating in her head like a drumbeat; she thought it was a better word in English because it was harsher sounding in English, hard and solid like the condemnation that came with it. The English murder reminded her of the Serbian _mrz_. Her father had rarely sworn, but he'd used _mrzim_ more than any other verb in either Russian or Serbian when pushed to his limits, repeatedly, sometimes. As she sat down at the table, she pictured the time a month before her father's death when she'd woken up late at night to find him at the table, fists clenched in his hair, muttering _ja me mrze_ again and again and again as her mother tried to comfort him.

Ovdotya and Ma-Ti came in the front door and Linka gestured them over, not even noticing the way Ma-Ti's Ring pulsed as he tried to get a read on her. "What happened?" he asked, prompting Linka to look over at him with an unreadable expression.

 _No more lies. No more omissions,_ she thought, stubbornly pushing down her own anxiety and pain. _If Wheeler and I have a daughter, she will never see me break down and say I hate myself. I will never lie to Wheeler about anything ever again. No more hiding, even from the ugliest truths, the coldest things. I am too old to keep playing make-believe with myself. It won't get better until everyone knows the truth._

"The press-" Anatoly began, and she cut him off. She loved him, distantly, as she might a brother or a friend. She always would. But Anatoly was like his father, like her own father – he would do what it took to survive even if that meant lying to everyone around him.

"My father killed someone in self-defense. He was jumped by anti-Serbian Russian nationalists, and then he panicked, because he was outnumbered. He became very depressed afterwards. He drank. One day, he got into the car with my mother while he'd had several drinks too many, and they crashed. Most papers only ever cared that my parents were dead. No one outside the family should know what he did except the other men who jumped him. Now that I am famous, one of them has come forward to the police with evidence, whatever that is, however little there is, to tell their version of events, which is skewed, and wrong, and does not tell you that he spent a month in mourning or that he may have crashed deliberately according to the coroner."

After that, there was nothing more to say. She let the silence fall over the room, unrelenting and harsh as everything else seemed to be in her life.

Wheeler collapsed into the chair beside her, mouth open, making a choking sound. Kwame was frozen. Gi had tears filling her startled eyes; she came from a country full of discrimination, but it rarely resulted in lethal crime. Ovdotya swore quietly and put an arm around Ma-Ti's shoulders protectively, as if shielding him from whatever his reaction was; he leaned against her, shrinking back. Linka didn't look at Anatoly because they'd had this talk before and it never got easier with him trying to rationalize things, make sense of the impossibly awful.

 _No more hiding, not now. And if I could take these words back, I wouldn't._

 _It'd be like changing my name._

* * *

The Water Ring obeyed Blight's every command now.

She was practicing with it because it needed to be broken in. It was stubborn, resistant, it fought her every step of the way as she tried to get more control and more precision, but she had to come through. She was going to make Russia burn for what they'd done to Illarion and his people, they were going to be the laughingstock of the entire world for how foolish they'd been and despised everywhere for how they'd let their own people mutate and die en masse rather than make reparations, and then they'd fork over all the resources that they owed their victims, she hated them they were monsters how could they do this to someone she loved-

All around her, the water she'd been working with froze into a protective dome as if to shield her from her own thought. Staring up at the foggy ice, she swallowed thickly. Alright, so she'd gotten a bit chummy with the creepy mutant who trailed radiation in his wake like a naïve, juvenile death spirit. That didn't mean she loved him. She didn't want to love anyone. It would eat into too much of her time, chip away at her selfish agenda. The only thing that stayed in life was wealth. There was money to made in hurting the world, and if that sounded merciless, then maybe the world should have shown her mercy at some point, should have proved her wrong. People left. Sometimes, people left by degrees, withdrawing by degrees until they had slipped away without her noticing. Sometimes people up and left for their own selfish reasons and didn't bother explaining why to her. Both were better than the people who decided that rather than just burning bridges, they needed to scorch her personally. Her heart was a bitter, blackened, charred thing she was proud to say rarely bothered her. She was the sort of person who entertained end of the world scenarios and fantasies of perfect power when she laid in bed trying to get to sleep at night.

But damn if Ilya didn't trust her despite everything, if he didn't look at her like she set the sun in the sky and made the moon shine. Every tiny thing she gave to him, from a sandwich to a day of bedrest, he treated as if she'd handed him the Holy Grail. He loved things as mundane as the blankets she'd gotten for him to the vastness of the open sky – he could stare out the window endlessly, fascinated, enthralled by nature's beauty. In some way that was kind of pathetic, that he loved nature while being so toxic to it that he couldn't even touch the Ring without tainting it for hours afterwards. What would Gaia think of him, of the thousands of people living underground in the ruins of two cities that had once been thriving with humans? They were radically altered by the manmade abomination of intense radiation, not by some cosmic design. In the whole world, they were the one thing Gaia had never had a hand in creating.

Figured someone would have to be almost literally not of this Earth to be a decent person. Blight focused and the ice dropped into water again. It pooled at her feet, the most innocuous looking of weapons, the most basic of natural resources, and she wondered if Gi had ever entertained the fact that human beings were mostly composed of water. Rip that out, and life went out like a red-doused candle. Water in the lungs would be a quicker way to drown someone than holding them down in it. Here in Russia, in the winter just dousing someone with water and stranding them might kill them from exposure. All of it was awful. Awful was routine. Awful was normal. She remembered waking up as a child at the slightest sound and rolling under the bed, hiding beside her sister, trying to stave off the inevitable abuse. Barbara had wanted to kill their father. She'd entertained the thought for years until finally, in high school, she got into a Chemistry class. Back then she'd loved her sister dearly, enough to decide they'd be better off in the foster care system than in their father's hands, and had arranged a chemical concoction that mimicked the effects of food poisoning.

People thought Doctor Barbara Blight was a monster as it was. They had no idea what she was like when she had someone she cared about to think of. Whatever restraints existed in her head, they quit existing when someone else's wellbeing was on the line. She remembered reading some tearfully boring book in her high school years for a class, some literature assignment, that had a main character refer to himself as 'the demon that comes when you say its' name'. Blight was one better than that. She came when people said the name of someone else, someone who was hers. And with the massive power imbalance in their situations, she could more or less own Illarion if she wanted to. If she could work around the radiation, they could live together permanently, he could work alongside MAL and help her with things, inbetween staring at the world and gushing over the joy that was life. He'd been filled with joy at the sight of a seagull earlier. This man was clearly putty in her hands ready to be sculpted, handled, manipulated into something more than just a business partner. He was only intimidating at first, and because he came from a culture that killed people who were a drain on resources. Blight took whatever resources she needed. Including people – what better definition of human resources was there?

Her smirk faded as she fiddled with the Ring on her finger. Truthfully, even with MAL, things got lonely, sometimes. Illarion was so new to everything and so removed from normal human cultures that he could not comprehend murder or abuse. In a world of monsters, he was safe. He was the one person she would never have to worry about betraying her. And it was rough, being on guard all the damn time. Maybe she did really love him, a little, as much as somebody like her could, anyway.

"Now," an all-too-familiar voice said behind her, "You're finally getting it."

Dr. Blight whipped around to face Gaia, instantly seething at the astral projection, see-through as it was, in front of her. Her mind raced. Were the Planeteers en route? The answer was almost definitely yes, so even though she'd opened her mouth to insult the spirit of the Earth, her eyes instead darted to the safehouse. How was she going to get Illarion out of here in time? He might be able to muck up the Ring enough to keep Captain Planet from being summoned, but maybe four Rings was enough – and then what, what were they supposed to do to get out in one piece? Illarion would get strapped down to a table somewhere and cut open by the government, she knew that. That was the way of the world regardless of what country it was.

She squared her shoulders and crossed her arms. "I'll kill at least one of your precious planet-huggers if you send them here, and I'll use your own weapon to do it."

Gaia smiled almost maternally at her. "I know. They aren't on their way. You know, in a way, it seems fated that you're the one who might bring those people out of the dark." The spirit turned her gaze towards where Illarion lay sleeping. "He and his kind are so distant to me. Their hearts are hard and their minds are like machines. I knew it would take something extraordinary to pull them out of their stupor. All that radiation – it changes people, you know, and their descendents. I had feared they were lost to me."

"And what, you think I'm going to hand them over to you so you can end them? I know you. You act like there's no radioactive material in the Earth, like oil is some human invention and you're just oh so sick of us _normally_. People who leak radiation are your hitlist. You can't fool me."

A long-suffering sigh. "If I didn't know any better, I'd swear I knew one of your ancestors. I know the world has never been kind to you. That doesn't mean I hate the way others have hated. Being immortal changes a person's perspective. I don't hate his people. I think being willing to blow up another nuclear facility to get the government's attention is heinous, but I don't hate them. I don't blame them. The world has done nothing to show them they should have any reason to believe there's any other recourse."

"Because there isn't," Blight insisted firmly. "Where were you when they needed you, anyway? If you weren't involved enough to stop things, you really don't have any right to barge in now."

"I was asleep."

It took a lot to render her speechless, but the doctor stared at her, clearly confused at how three words possibly explained everything. Gaia continued after the pause stretched on into confused silence.

"One day, the world might be ready to hear the whole story. For now, only the Planeteers and Zarm know. I made a deal with the spirit of War that I thought was the right thing to do at the time. A hundred years of sleep, in exchange for him not lifting a hand to stir humans to conflict of any kind for a hundred years. You can imagine my surprise when I woke up and found out you had all managed two World Wars in that span of time."

Blight huffed, crossing her arms. "I'm not _remotely_ surprised. This world's rotten. It always has been. That's why you've gotta take what you can and look out for yourself. Looks like you learned that the hard way. But it doesn't mean I trust you."

"You don't have to. If you can use the Ring, you aren't as far gone as I thought. You may be able to change. In fact, I'm counting on it."

"And you were such a great judge of humanity's character before." She rolled her eyes, and Gaia simply shut her eyes, looking more resigned than someone who was technically an embodiment of metaphysics should be able to.

"I'm telling you now what I told War then: I believe people, in spite of everything, will prove you wrong."


	10. Chapter 10

**Author's Note:** While it only gets passing mention in this chapter and is explored in more depth next chapter, all my Chernobyl references are legit. There really is a substance called chernobylite, and it is so toxic being caught with it counts as being caught with a biological weapon in many countries. Orange lightning is in fact quite common in the area around Chernobyl, and there are pictures of it occurring inside buildings, though with less frequency in the last decade. Ukraine really did get full responsibility over the area containing the most radiation after the fall of the USSR. Whether that counts as getting screwed over by Russia or getting it by virtue of getting all Ukrainian speaking parts of the country is a hotly debated topic in real life. For the purposes of this fanfic I'm not going to take on that debate, mostly because it's too complicated. Some Ukrainians want Chernobyl because This Land Is My Land It Is Not Your Land, some want Russia to fix it since they broke it, some Russians want it so they can salvage scrap materials/research wildlife there, some Russians happily say It's Your Problem Now. Some people on both sides don't care. All of that is beyond the scope of this fanfic since Linka, while Russian, is not a nuclear scientist so neither government would care what she had to say on the matter. That, and I have way too many subplots going as it is, we cannot afford to add any others into the mix.

I decided not to translate a bit of Russian slang and a bit of Korean. Gi gets to use Korean slang because she's Japanese-Korean and context makes it make sense, the one bit of Russian slang I gave up on, I gave up on after realizing 200 words explaining a _single_ word just isn't a good use of my readers' time. Moskva is how Russian speakers spell Moscow, but outside of one specific context I'll be sticking to Moscow for the sake of my overworked spellcheck function.

Viktoriya Daineko is a real Russian pop star. I headcanon that Linka likes her music. Look, everybody has a pop singer they like, even if they're a classical music fan. My mom used to teach classical music and went through a Celine Dion phase. It happens.

Another side note that becomes important next chapter – Chukotka Okrug really does have an active mining industry. In the time since the USSR fell it's developed into more of a lumber and factory territory, but when the USSR first faceplanted, it was mostly mining. I know I'm fiddling with the timeline of things a bit here and there to fit with the show but just assume oblasts, okrugs and krais in Russia are Like Real Life Unless Otherwise Specified.

* * *

The truly awful thing was that Wheeler could see exactly where Linka's father was coming from.

Wheeler didn't have kids, but if he asked himself if he'd shoot someone to save his family, to save Linka, to save him? He knew he would. He imagined what it would be like to have his family depending on him for income and knew that as much as the idea of shooting someone up close made him want to be ill, he'd have done it. There was no insurance payout in the Russian system for having been beaten to death by white supremacists, but more than that, there was no replacing someone's father. Linka would never have recovered from that. It was basic self defense, basic logic, to take a shot. Wheeler grew up in a bad enough neighborhood to know that when one guy pulled a gun, whole groups could and would usually scatter. Even if one side had the numbers, the phrase 'God created men, guns made them equal' had weight to it for a reason. One shot, one person down, and Jevrem lived to see another day.

Presumably in an alleyway at night there wasn't much in the way of light or room to aim. Presumably, Jevrem hadn't known until everyone scattered exactly who he shot: a twelve year old wannabe gangster as young as his own _son_ , a confused teenager lost and tangled up with the wrong crowd, but by then there were people calling the cops. By then it was too late to stay or take it back. Linka explained how it had been in on TV that morning, after Jevrem got back and showered and couldn't stop moving. Pacing, biting at the skin around his fingers, he broke down when the news casually discussed the boy not making it. Blood loss from a shoulder wound was highly deadly, particularly when the body was so small, as the bullet's impact was disproportionate. Everyone in the media thought it was deliberate. Actually, as Linka learned from her mother later, her father had only fired his gun twice in his life before, both times to break up fights. He'd never killed anyone else. He had never been in that position, because he was just a thief, a conman, someone who got goods from point A to point B and sold things of various dubiousness for a profit. He wasn't a saint, but he wasn't a murderer. He wasn't shooting to kill. That wasn't who he was. He just wanted to make it out alive. He had kids to provide for. He couldn't end up dead and disgraced in an alley. A warning shot was supposed to be just that, a warning, and then it was supposed to be over.

It was hard to fire in an alley not eight feet wide and not hit someone when there were seven people in front of you. It was a horrible mistake, an accident, a disaster, and what was a guy supposed to do after that kind of thing? He'd been afraid for weeks afterwards of people identifying him, pressing charges, then when no one showed up to do so it ate away at him. The guilt was unimaginable. He barely slept, barely ate, woke up thinking he'd heard Mihaljo screaming only to find the apartment eerily quiet.

"Mrz," he'd muttered, sobbing into his wife's should and curling up on the couch late at night as Linka carefully eavesdropped. "Mrzim samog sebe!" _**Hate**_ _, I hate myself!_

Her mother had taken his hands to keep him from digging his nails into his palms until they bled and sat with him as he stared at the TV, eyes distant. Her Serbian was rusty, yet she made valiant efforts to keep up with his breakdown, his lapse into his mother tongue, carefully speaking sense to the madness, but it was a failing fight. Some people were not capable of living with acts of evil like that, even accidental ones. Wheeler didn't know if he could have lived with it, either, with killing a _kid_ , with hurting someone who was just lost and confused and probably not evil in the slightest, someone who had their whole life ahead of them to change.

He did know now that Serbians comprised over sixty percent of suicides in Yugoslavia despite being about fourteen percent of the population.

At some point he'd latched onto Linka's hands and found himself running his thumbs in circles over her knuckles, looking at her face, a portrait of determination in the face of pain, awful ugly truths on full display for her friends to see. She had lived with this for years, with only a few people knowing, keeping all the emotional fallout locked up inside. Her shoulders were squared like she expected to have to defend her father to the entire room. She didn't. Wheeker glanced over to see Ma-Ti was silently crying into Ovdotya's jacket; she had an arm around his shoulders like he was her kid brother, and met his gaze evenly. _I've got this,_ she said with her eyes, apparently prioritizing protecting him over her own reaction. Gi was uncharacteristically quiet. Japan's suicide rate was high enough it never left the top twenty countries in world rankings. In recent years it had climbed into the top ten. He couldn't read her expression, although her eyes were sad and she kept biting her lip, chewing at it in a nervous habit she rarely engaged in these days. Kwame's hand was on hers; the lack of reaction was telling about how much this topic was hitting too close to home for her. Kwame himself just looked tired, exhausted with how this simple in and out mission had unearthed all the pain his friend had buried inside. Belatedly, as an afterthought, Wheeler looked over at Anatoly, whose own mother had committed suicide – and he'd been there to see the body. The Russian's entire body language was rigid, forcibly professional, like he could retreat into the shell of Administrative Director Yurasov and not have to be Tolya, the little boy who'd come home one day to find his mother lifeless in the bathtub. The shield was up in full force, the same way the fake smile had been up at the ballet. It was the only armor he had.

"So we're going to be looking at some political fallout," Anatoly began, and the strain to Keep It Together was obvious in his voice. Wheeler wondered if they shouldn't just take a ten minute break and reconvene for the sake of his sanity. "Yugoslavia is a mess Linka cannot keep ignoring with her extended family there, and someone _will_ bring it up in that coded 'are Serbs violent' way the media adores the more exposure her father's actions get. Self-defense is not going to be believed because of who shot and who was shot. The only way we might be able to get this swept under the rug is to divert media attention somewhere else."

Ovdotya exhaled, frustrated with her own idea before she voiced it. "We're going to Sverdlovsk."

"Didn't you just explain why we can't?" Kwame asked, raising an eyebrow.

She gestured to the room. "We need to split the team. We need to get to Sverdlovsk to get answers on the nuclear initiative and its' safety issues. We need to talk to officials here to keep them assured the world aka the Planeteers are taking Russia's environmental issues seriously so no international incidents happen. We need to locate Gi's Ring. We need to get the media back on the side of the Planeteers. We can't do all that and huddle together."

Anatoly massaged what was already becoming a visible migraine. "Alright. Alright, we can do this. Gi will need to stay here for damage control. Japan is big on nuclear energy, her talking to officials would get press and possibly improve Japanese-Russian relations, not to mention people from the Koryo-saram community want to meet her. Chukotka's representative has been gunning for some kind of meeting with Kwame to discuss comparative mining ethics and get more of a spotlight on his area's economic and environmental struggles. Kwame?"

"I can do that," the African teen immediately agreed. That it would let him stay relatively close to Gi was a welcome bonus, but he knew what it was like to be from nowhere anyone cared about and have a lot of environmental worries. "I would like to help them regardless of circumstances. Mining rarely gets the attention it deserves from the press."

"Great. Now, we absolutely _cannot_ send an American to Sverdlovsk, they're still bitter about the Cold War. I know, it's petty; it's politics, things always are. But this is not a good time to send Linka anywhere without backup-"

Ovdotya cut him off. "Ma-Ti and I will go. I work the politics, he works the people, we play it as some concern for the emotional stability of places jilted by that conflict, we get in and out in a week, tops." She cut Ma-Ti's protest off with, "You're cute, cute sells. It'll work." He turned bright red and sputtered, but didn't object. "Tolya, you've got to go suck up to Gospozha Lysenko, we're going to need to look at Pripyat – that's Chernobyl, for the American in the room – and she's in control of the whole Chernobyl Exclusion Zone now that the Ukraine has succeeded. So you might have to hunker down here for a while."

Linka folded her arms. "I know what you're both thinking and I am not going to do it."

"Lenoshka," her ex-boyfriend said in a not very official at all voice, sounding one argument away from raiding his father's liquor cabinet just to make this day stop being a very long nightmare, "At this point, I give up on that front. I gave up a long time ago. If you really want to drag this out, fine, we'll scrap my old plan on what to do if the media broke this story. But you're going to need to do _something_ in some official capacity or you're going to come under immediate fire, and I have no idea what that'd be."

"I have a plan," she informed him, making him wince. "No, it's not _that_. Or any part of the old plan we used to have for this. Wheeler and I are going to go on SKM."

"…the talk show," Anatoly said flatly, massaging his temples with his fingers. "You want to distract everyone with gossip about your new boyfriend. By announcing to the world that you're dating via the most watched talk show in Russia. Damn, if this is what you do to the men you _love_ , I'm a little glad you hate me."

"I don't _hate_ you." She looked directly into his eyes, and he sighed, eyes softening, conceding the point. "RTV airs on a delay in the United States, on cable. It will be a good way to show people our countries can come together."

Wheeler held up a hand like he was in class. "Do I get a say in this? What's SKM anyway?"

The Russians in the room gave him three highly pitying looks.

* * *

"Bashushka?"

Dr. Blight fought to keep from turning red at the ridiculously affectionate diminutive of her first name. Ilya blinked innocently at her, frowning at a book in his hands. He was stabilizing from their excursion into Moscow before still, so she'd given him books to read so he could feel productive. A lack of productivity was something he'd seen people killed over before, something he might've reported people for himself, thus signing their death warrants. His anxiety was too great to let him really rest; even with her assurances that she wouldn't report anything to his superiors, to him, that abandoned underground city was his entire world. Their values were the only values that really existed. To not work was to volunteer to die. She had to come up with low-effort alternatives that tricked him into thinking he was doing valuable work just to keep his anxiety down to manageable levels.

But oh, the questions he had. "It says here that cloning from adults results in cellular degeneration. I don't understand. I was cloned from an adult human, and I'm fine. Everyone back home is."

She thought about debating their definitions of fine. Instead, she let out a huff of air, leaning against the wall. "Radiation changes cellular structure. Maybe that makes you and the rest of the urban legends in that ghost town the exceptions."

"Oh." He glanced between her body and his, as if trying to discern some difference worth remarking upon. The only one that she thought was instantly visible was in their eye colors, his inhuman orange. Orange like chernobylite, she'd learned, like the lightning scientists had snapped pictures of within the ruins of the nuclear reactor. Not that there was much chernobylite on the market to compare his eyes to, admittedly; it was as illegal as he was. "You're staring at me."

"Sorry, Ilya." Blight forced her gaze off him – one day she'd get used to his eyes' dull glow, it just wasn't today. "You're not as pale as you were earlier. How're you feeling, handsome?"

"Better- wait, what?" he blushed, shrinking back slightly as if trying to make himself smaller. She was oddly fascinated by how even at his most red, he was still like a porcelain doll.

Suddenly she became aware she was staring at his pale pink lips and shut her eyes, trying to come up with a joke that could downplay what she'd as a joke. She flirted with every eco-villain she teamed up with, even temporarily, just out of habit. Controlling men was easy. With him, there was a complete lack of experience, of fight or resistance or pretending he wasn't affected, and it tripped her up. People this honest threw a wrench into how she understood the world's workings. Illarion was the sort of easy mark she would normally break and discard like trash when she was done with him. More than once, the thought popped into her head as she watched him read, that she could make him do anything, that he was just a puppet on a string for her. She was the source of his access to the world outside his city, she had a tight grip on his reigns from the day she'd made contact with him, from the moment he was assigned to her to be her dramatic stage-presenter villainous sidekick. And he did dramatics well, he liked playing games with the Planeteers, he was just devious enough that sometimes she could imagine throwing him back to the den of wolves he came from without remorse. Then he would glance up, the light filling his citrine colored eyes, pure trust etched into every inch of his face, and she tried to remember his people weren't technically people. That never really worked for long. As much as knowing she could manipulate him made her feel safe, she found herself oddly reluctant to actually do it.

He set the book aside and got to his feet, cautiously approaching her. He was taller than her, yet thinner, leaner, born of a society that had never quite enough to go around. Re-education was more common than the nightmarish executions he'd been threatened with his whole life just because they needed a certain number of people to sustain the group. She studied his face as he stepped closer, wondering how many times they'd scrubbed his mind clean, implanted correct doctrine to make him a better worker into his head. Illarion stared back at her, seeming so much younger in these close quarters than he had the day they met. She unfolded her arms and he very gingerly reached out to brush her hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. Blight braced herself for the usual questions – how did it happen, did it hurt, wasn't there anything that doctors could do to make it better – only to be surprised when he leaned in and ghosted his lips over each of her cheeks, just barely, before leaning back, holding his breath.

No one as knowledgeable regarding nuclear physics, radiation and biology had the right to be this naïve to how the world worked. Even though just being around him was taking time off her lifespan, she reached out and forcibly tugged him into a tight embrace. He exhaled a half-gasp, half-relieved sound, a 'oh good I didn't cross a line' mixed with confusion on what came next. After a few moments where she rested her head against the place his neck and shoulder neck, Illarion wrapped his arms around her in return. He felt warm, soft. _Like home,_ she thought, shutting her eyes and burying her nose into him to try to memorize how he smelled. He stiffened, shifting a little, uncomfortable but not resistant, compliant yet new.

"You're beautiful, you know," he ventured quietly, timidly, as if sharing some great secret of the universe with her. Blight hated and loved that he made her feel like the center of his life when he talked like that. "And I – I really care about you, Basha. I know maybe I shouldn't," he babbled as she dug her fingers into his shirt, gripping the fabric tightly to brace herself against the incoming emotions she desperately did not want to feel, knowing her resolve would break if he uttered the right sequence of words, "I hope it's okay, that I…" Deep breath, then, quickly: "I love you, even though I'm not really human."

She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his head down, crushing her lips against his. It took him several stunned seconds to remember to breathe at all. She had to coach him into movement, his every motion experimental and unsure, until something deep within his brain clicked and he kissed her back properly, albeit gracelessly, smiling and serene as the eye of a hurricane.

"It's okay," Barbara told him, gruffly. "Just be you, Ilya, baby. That's what I love."

The Ring thrummed on her hand and she barely even noticed.

* * *

SKM stood for _Sveta, Kamera, Moskva!_ and was sort of like if a talk show had a baby with the news.

When dinner time rolled around, Linka hauled Wheeler to her guest room in Anatoly's house to at least let him watch an episode in private. The host of the show was young, charming and obscenely good looking, and cheerfully played some clips of various officials on both sides of the nuclear initiative debate before mocking both sides and their total lack of understanding of what nuclear science was. At one point, he pulled out a children's book on the subject and read aloud from it to drive the point home. There was a musical guest (given Linka's grin and the peals of applause from the audience Viktoriya Daineko was a very big deal as a singer in Russia) who got to give a fairly decent interview about the music industry post-Soviet Union. Ultimately, she seemed hopeful that the arts would survive in Russia regardless of whatever might come. There was a director on to discuss his upcoming film, _The Chekist_ , which was about war crimes during the Russian Civil War. Discussion of the line between horror and historical film came up, with added discussion of whether or not it was intended to be a statement on current wars. Wheeler had not been expecting it to take a turn for the deep and compare the Russian Civil War to current events and the uncertainty faced by the world, but the host, Yulian Dyomin, was clearly more than just a ridiculously pretty face. He could pierce people with questions like an interrogator. Wheeler was both impressed and, if he was going to be honest, kind of intimidated.

"Babe? Are you mad at me?" he asked, taking in the rapt and laughing audience as Dyomin shot off one liners. "He's a little intense, don't you think?"

" _Da_. I had such a crush on him when I was younger," she admitted openly, grinning at him. "It seems I have a type. I like opinionated men."

He couldn't help smiling back. "But I'm more handsome than he is, right?"

She tilted her head, pretending to think about it intensely. "He dresses better than you do."

"Gee, thanks. You're not gonna take me shopping before we go on, are you?"

" _Nyet_." Linka waited until he exhaled a sigh of relief to explain, "Tolya will. I am hopeless with men's clothes."

Wheeler tried to envision an experience more soul-sucking than going clothes shopping with his girlfriend's ex and shuddered. "Well, that answers my question about you being mad at me."

She leaned against him, rolling her eyes. It was after dinner, and everyone was either trying to sleep or watching TV – only the Yurasov family would be so bad at communicating with each other they needed multiple TVs in the house to watch the same show – and they could hear, distantly, Ma-Ti on the phone with Ovdotya. Linka was willing to bet there was a crush forming there, although she knew Ovdotya well enough to know it was one-sided on Ma-Ti's part. Kwame, Gi and Anatoly had spent more time trying to puzzle out the journal, but the nuclear secrets and inventions in it had to take a backseat to doing damage control in the media in the coming days. Linka pulled her hair out of its' usual ponytail to help with the growing headache and readjusted her spot on Wheeler's shoulder, watching her boyfriend desperately try to keep up with the closed captioning in Russian. Back as he was at the spoken – and oh, Wheeler was a disaster sometimes – he was remarkably good at reading. He waited until a commercial for kvass to talk again.

"Babe? Are you okay?" He shifted, picking his words carefully. "I mean, all this, it's really heavy stuff, but you seem… I don't know. Calm, maybe?"

Linka shut her eyes and listened to the pleasant background noise of Russian commercials on the TV and her boyfriend's heartbeat. "You are right. It is heavy. All of these things I try to live with, they are weighing me down, and it gets hard sometimes. But I am not carrying all of it alone anymore." She squeezed his hand with hers, letting herself smile a sad smile. "My Otac would have liked you so much. He could never afford to be opinionated the way he wanted to. Someone as loud as you would have been welcomed in with open arms."

Wheeler watched her choke back tears, feeling an absence where his girlfriend's family should have been in their lives. "And your ma?"

"Ugh, she would have hated you. But only for a bit," she laughed, tears tumbling down her cheeks lightly. "You are like an addiction, you grow on people eventually."

"…when this mess is settled, you wanna go to New York with me? Hang out with my old man, y'know, make sure we actually know what he'd think of you."

She wiped at her eyes, but her smile was bright and genuine. " _Da_ , I would. I would love to."

Nazar took a very deep breath and knocked on Gi's door. He was painfully sober.

"I know," he said in response to her expression. "There isn't a soul in this household that _wants_ to talk to me. But I _need_ you to. I need you to do a little censorship regarding that journal of my father's – hear me out," he intoned appealingly, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Nothing relevant to your research or his, just to my family's honor. You're Japanese, more or less. You understand what a tarnished family name can mean in some circles."

After a pause in which she counted to ten in two languages, she opened the door to usher him in. It shut with a click that seemed deafening solely based on who she was standing near. "Alright, I'm listening."

He sat down on the ottoman by the bed. Fair enough; it _was_ his house. Rubbing at his temple, he looked at the teen with an obvious discomfort painted all over his every movement. "I assume you're deep enough in to have heard my father mention a Gospozha Rosaline Davis."

"The black nuclear physicist, yes," she confirmed, picking the journal up. Her notes on it were nearly as thick as the actual thing and she wasn't even a fourth of the way through. "She sounds like she could have turned the tide of the Cold War if she had ever been taken seriously."

"Undoubtedly, but that's not what I'm here to discuss with you. You're going over that with your boyfriend and my son. Both of them are level-headed enough – well, no, actually, I disapprove of both of them, but that's beside the point. My son absolutely cannot read that book in its' entirety. He will never get over it." At her blank expression, he held out his hand. "Here, I'll show you. I don't know that I trust you to keep this secret, but circumstances have forced my hand."

She waited until he found the page in question with frightening speed, as if he'd read this particular part again and again. For a moment she struggled to read the Russian cursive so common to the 50's. Then it hit her, abrupt as a punch to the chest: _For all that I am not a religious man, I pray this sin will be forgiven. God help me, but when I go to push her away, I find myself only entwined further. This love is insidious, it grew so naturally out of what was but a simple friendship, so gradually I had no inkling it was happening until I was already in far too deep to turn away. Each touch of her lips to mine is as a warm coat upon the shoulders of a frozen beggar, and I am alight with her heat, I am burning, we are both hopelessly burning before we even set foot in Hell._

"I _know_ ," Nazar muttered, grin not matching the acid in his voice. "Oh, what a very unique motivation he had to campaign for a peace between the States and Russia. I dare say you've never encountered this in any spy flick your American friend ever showed you."

Gi continued staring at the journal. "Did your mother know that…?"

He shuddered, for once not out of dramatics. "And have her think herself _adstoi_? No, of course not. I obtained the journal late enough in life she was fighting a losing war with Alzheimer's and all my siblings had managed to get themselves killed, I didn't need to add to that load. There is more. Plenty more, unfortunately. Apparently this was written with the intent to be burned, given when I bought it off a scavenger, it had been found in a stove."

"Why didn't you burn it?" she asked, hesitantly. He was being frighteningly non-monstrous. She wasn't sure she liked thinking of someone as happily ethnocentric and racist as him as a worn out person with a legacy to protect.

"It's the only thing of my father's I have," he replied in a very small voice. Instantly, against her will, her heart went out to him. Nazar shut his eyes, drawing himself up into a rigid sitting position, trying to compose himself. "I know you won't believe me when I say that, or that I intended – intend, perhaps, still – to sit Anatoly down one day and explain this. And I was. But I was going to do it after the dust from the Cold War completely settled. It may be over, but a man of my father's stature, from that era, having been intimate with an American? The press would eat my son alive with comparisons between himself and Linka, probably imply he had some secret girl on the side, just to generate gossip. I can't – I can't let that happen to him. I'm a monster because it's kept me alive, not because it's _fun_. I drink until it's fun, but there isn't enough vodka in all the Urals to make this bearable. Please, just don't tell my Tolya, I know I argue with him every day, I know I have no right to ask you to do anything, but I am not a man without a heart or a man without means. Anything you want, I can-"

She set the journal down loudly. He quit talking. "Stop. Just – stop. I don't need to be paid to do the right thing."

The older Yurasov smiled joylessly at her. "Yet. You don't need that yet. But when you do, my offer is good for as long as I draw breath."

"Do you really have that little faith in humanity?" Gi found herself asking, not wanting to have any sadness regarding this man's disaster of a life. She was good at being righteously angry. That was going to be a lot harder the longer he sat here and conducted himself like an actual human being as opposed to his normal ice king and consummate opportunist persona. "Alright, if you really think I need to ask something from you, how about you cut back on the drinking? Let yourself live long enough to try to repair things with your son."

"That ship has sailed," he groaned, shaking his head sadly and getting to his feet. "Sailed across the sea, circumvented the globe, and returned to port laden with exotic spices. If you come up with something a bit more plausible I can do for you or pay unto you, you know where to find me. Tell Kwame my offer extends to him as well, to the fullest extent." He smiled another soulless smile at her, eyes as distant as the horizon as he left, closing the door silently behind him.

Only after he left did she realize she hadn't corrected him when he'd called Kwame her boyfriend.

And now she had to explain this to him.

" _Mwong mi_."


End file.
